How to explain programming to young children

A recent article on Slashdot had an interesting comment titled Here's my way of explaining "programming" authored by "Sun" (or Shachar) [minor typos corrected]:

Caveat - I have never actually tried it, and I developed it for adults. I still think it might work with 2nd graders (probably too complex).

Ask for a volunteer. Write a bunch of numbers on the board, and tell the volunteer to sort them.

Explain that this is not programming.

Now, cover the volunteer's eyes, write some more numbers on the board, and tell him to tell you to sort them. Allow asking "what is the first number" and such.

Explain that this is, also, not programming.

Now, tell the volunteer to tell you how to sort the numbers before they are written on the board. Explain that once the numbers are written on the board, you will not hear any comment from him. Write the instructions down on the board. When they are done, write down numbers and carry the instructions out. Try to pick numbers that won't work with their instructions. Allow the class to fix the instructions, but any time they do, restart the whole thing.

This is programming.

Shachar

While I agree that it seems a bit involved for a 2nd grade classroom (where making a PB&J sandwich might be more appropriate), this seems like a good approach for middle school and up.

Technically, this is demonstrating how to create an algorithm, but creating an algorithm to solve a task is a big part of programming. Once the algorithm is done, the programmer must then implement it efficiently in a programming language.

A variant of this would be to pair up the students and give each group a set of cards to sort - cards should be a bit easier for the blindfolded student to work with. After each group has created their sorting algorithm, the algorithms can be shared with the class and you can run through examples to improve them collaboratively.