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Teach kids Ruby and if they are interested they will learn other languages later. Ruby (before you go on to rails) is very flexible in its use and good to branch from. C++, javascript, and opengl have very particular use cases, which is fine if you know thats you want to do, but pointless if you just want to learn generalised programming concepts...

If you want to go lower-level better to learn some assembly (or at least C) instead...

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Agreed on assembly. Some beginners take exceptionally well to the "purity" they perceive in assembly (given that it's a good assembly language for a well thought out processor - a processor that doesn't physically exist could even be the best one).

Edit: Purity in the way that the crucial ideas are presented directly, and an intuitive understanding of primal computation can be gained directly.

Might I suggest Python instead? It's more immediately useful to kids interested in the sciences.

Let's do both.

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