I guess the question is what part of the rock face you want to lead them up first.
One of the motivations behind Bitlash (http://bitlash.net) was to provide a learner's language without a lot of the baggage. You can get pretty far teaching basic concepts without having to explain what int and void mean. It might be worth a look for your workshop.
// blink13 example in bitlash
function toggle13 {d13=!d13;}
function startup {pinmode(13,1); run toggle13, 500;}
-br