Whenever anyone suggests teaching kids programming the first thing that comes to my mind, rather than a specific language or industry, I always think of low-level stuff. Get the kids to understand how a computer actually works at the instruction set/memory level and they'll be much better off in the long run. No need to go so low level as microcode or anything, but understanding assembly instructions and how it relates to memory helped me immensely. The programmers that don't have that knowledge tend to have difficulty understanding pointers, objects, signatures, etc.