note bmann Great question - I'll have to bookmark this thread.<p> I have an 8 year old too. Codes and ciphers are real popular with her and her classmates right now. About a month ago I took her to the library and she checked out every book she could find, and she's spent hours creating her own substitution ciphers. <p> A few days ago she asked me if I could teach her how to "hack". I thought this was a great opportunity, so (after I explained the difference between "hack" and "crack") we sat down with paper and pencil and worked out what would have to happen to encrypt and decrypt a simple message. Then we sat down at the keyboard together and duplicated rot13, and she loved it.<p> It gave me an opportunity to talk about how characters are displayed, <code>chr</code> and <code>ord</code>, then <code>tr</code>. Since then, she's asked probably 10 times what else she could learn!<p> Our next project is printing triangles. You know the type... <code>X XX XXX XXXX</code> I'm going to start with hard coded print statements and from there teach her about loops.<p> Bottom line, I'd start with something fun that catches their attention as well as gives you a chance to explain some of the basics - I/O, conditionals, simple calculations, character manipulation, graphics, flow control, etc. If your presentation entertains, you'll engage more of the kids.<p> Whatever you decide to do, please post the results back here so we know how it turned out. 451305 451305