> My niece here in India is around 12 years old, and she is being taught C programming back in school(She is in 8th standard, or 8th grade as per US terms).
I have been in those Indian schools, and it's not what you think at all.
Did you check the portion/syllabus that is to be covered in 8th standard?
In my experience (7 - 8 years ago): Max they'd go is loops, preprocessing directives. I doubt they'd even write a function (not complex ones that return stuff anyway, forget call-by-value, call-by-reference)
> And oh, by the way. Next year they are about to be taught Java. I can only imagine the horror, the way kids of going to deal with the text walls full of verbosity, API dance and the XML mess. And the last time I heard they don't really use IDE's.
Teachers here are fans of "do it in text editor, so that you don't have autocomplete to guide you" (where normally text editor is Notepad (Windows)). I can assure you they aren't going to deal with anything like APIs, XML.
Java courses in India are a lot like "Rewriting this piece of code we wrote in C++ last sem in Java".
Also, computers in schools (state boards at least) are not a marking subject where you score out of 100 or 50. It's a graded subject (falls in the domain of physical education, crafts: generally ignored academically).
Indian education system has bigger problems anyway. Be assured this course is not what these guys at code.org are talking about.
EDIT: I am not being negative, but you'd rather take opinions of a person schooled in India (Mumbai, not Delhi, but more-or-less the same thing leaving out subtle differences) than an uncle of a student who only knows the name of the subject (analogous to courses in college).