@darius I taught my niece Ruby using Hackety Hack years ago. It was an easy install, Ruby is (imo) fun and generally useful, and there's plenty of Ruby help/resources out there. It looks like Hackety Hack is no longer maintained, but that would have been my answer 10 years ago 😆

I can't think of anything better than Excel today. Do kids still learn TI-BASIC on their graphing calculators?