Our son is 12 also, and I've been introducing him to programming over the last year, in phases: 1. We installed Scratch, and let him learn that. 2. After he got good at Scratch, I installed Love2d and helped him write a few really tiny games in Lua. 3. Last Christmas we bought him the book "Sam's Teach Yourself Minecraft Modding in 24 hours" by which he slowly learned the basics of Java. 4. This weekend he borrowed a…
Are you afraid that learning Java is going to kill any passion for programming? If you're only requirement is fun and learning, it seems like Java is not the best choice.