@ScottDafydd - I considered doing videos, but from past experience, they are the most time consuming to update if program features or UI changes, because it’s not a case of changing a word or two, but redoing the whole thing in some cases.
@TheAbstractMan - that’s exactly one of the apps I was thinking about above. The same company also make one called Daisy the Dinosaur, which is aimed at an even younger audience I believe. I’ve also heard of one called ‘Coddy’ that allows them to actually share the programs they’ve made with other people. Of course, none of the examples are ‘actual’ languages as far as i know but they look great for introducing general principles in a fun way.
@Ignatz - yes, not sure I would recommend them either. They’re certainly not my learning style. Again, far too passive - at least with the written word, you can read at your own pace, stop and start, do a bit of coding, re read etc. Much better. But I’m sure they suit some. I was just addressing the point made above about how difficult it is or isn’t to include one in an iBook.
@ScottDafydd: I thought it might be nice/helpful to have some videos (a) “looking over the shoulder” of kids dealing with Codea, and (b) showing discussions between a teacher and one or two kids (I like the Socratic-like approach of just leading by asking questions and have the kids come to conclusion by finding their own answers).
However, there are a whole lot of skills and resources involved in doing that, IMO. And while I think of myself as a decent technical writer, I’m not sure I’ve got the video “presence” or even the available time to pull it off.
I do appreciate the offer for help though, and should I get to that idea, I won’t forget 
@daveedvdv - no problem at all. You’d be surprised what you can do with something like Gravie (just £1.49 on the App Store). You could record a few clips using your inbuilt camera on the ipad, cut out just the bits you need, whack a filter on it to make it look professional and even add some text over the top. It’s all very intuitive and would probably only take 5-10 minutes top in post production.
@TheAbstractMan, @ScottDafydd: I have read about Hopscotch but not used it personally. I think the MIT connection you’re thinking of is Scratch, which is similar. The environment that comes with the Lego NXT sets uses some of the same ideas too.
To be honest though, I’m skeptical of the effectiveness of such visual programming environments for children or reading/writing age (and above). My impression so far is that such environments set certain expectations that keep the children from “scaling up”. On the plus side, they do get a solid grasp of some concepts like control structures and variables (but not of certain other notions). Also, I don’t find that “syntax” is a big hurdle in kids learning (at least, Lua syntax; C++ would be different, probably :-P).
I’ve also observed that there is a benefit in the child not thinking of their programming tool as a “toy”. For example, one of my daughters had apparently decided (without my realizing) that what we were doing was just “child’s play” and that what I do for a living is fundamentally different. At some point in a conversation with my wife (who is not a programmer), I mentioned that Lua was quite popular these days among professional developers and that Adobe Lightroom (a photo managing application that all os us at home use) used it as its front end implementation language. My daughter overheard this and starting asking questions that indicated that she had thought of Lua programming as not being “the real deal”. After that, her interest and ability to focus changed noticeably (for the better).
So for a child for whom typing/writing would be an inhibiting hurdle I’d probably try the visual programming environments if they show interest. But otherwise, I’d recommend going straight for traditional text-based programming.
@daveedvdv ahh, interesting take. Especially the bit about the idea of it being the ‘real deal’ a motivating factor, and one I can definitely see the validity of. Not even children want to feel like they’re ‘wasting their time’.
(Re gravie: that’s the right one!)