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If you were teaching a 14 year old the most important thing to expose them to the world of programming, what would it be? Let's say you have 1-2 hours a week and a year to do it.
www.khanacademy.org/cs/tutorials/programming-basics
CoronaSDK is also a good choice. Then there's all those sites like codecademy which would be helpful as well.
It's a collaborative code editor that will run the code in-browser, so we can write together and run the code all on the same screen. We've been working through simple problems and I've been teaching her how to solve her math homework programmatically.
A Lisp repl, I think, would be a fantastic tool for this -- and I suspect "Common Lisp, An Interactive Approach" might be the perfect text for homework.
If they have something they want to build themselves.
I tried all sorts of languages and tools. What has worked for me has been using the Arduino platform to build animatronic projects for Halloween (a pumpkin that yelled and flash LEDs), and Minecraft. With Minecraft you can create your own textures and game objects by using Java. Its really fun, and they can see the connection between code and results very quickly. Try it out.
A lot of people saying "start with teaching problem solving and algorithmic thinking" and while I agree that this might be "the best" way to learn how to do programming from some angles it is probably not especially motivating apart from to people who are intrinsically interested in math/logic puzzle type things.
It probably works as an approach in a CS programme where you have the luxury of saying "do this or you don't get a degree" and where you are trying to weed out people who might not hack it in the long run. It may also be more time efficient in developing actual programming skill, but that is not necessarily the point here.
A good example is to look at minecraft modding tutorials on youtube. Based on the commentary it's clear that some of these people don't really understand Java and don't really know what they are doing and are mainly learning by copying others. However they are still getting the results that they want to some degree so they keep going.
At some point these people will inevitably hit against hurdles because of their approach. At this point they may either give up in favour of some other hobby or they will naturally gravitate towards reading the accumulated wisdom about debugging techniques, OO design etc.
I can see why the more formal approach is appealing to people who started as being self taught and are introspecting about their own development as a programmer.
There's certainly plenty of times where I think about older programs I had written and thought "if only I had read textbook X first, that would have been much easier/better".