Ask HN: Curriculum ideas for teaching programming to middle school kids

3 points

9 years ago

Hey HN! I have plans to teach a 10-week, one-hour-a-week course to a group of kids in the 10-16 age range. These kids come from a poorer urban background and likely have no exposure to programming at all. I have some ideas for course content (discussed below), but I've never done anything like this before, so I have no idea if they're good ideas or not. I'd love to hear the thoughts of you all on what would work well, and I'd especially love to hear the stories of what worked well people who have done similar things before.

None of my plans are set in stone yet, but my general plan is to make the course as interactive and fun as possible. There was a thread recently[0] discussing Robotopia, which I like the premise behind. I'm not sure if it's quite polished enough yet to be used. I'm heavily considering using either the offline or online version of Scratch[1] but don't know quite what direction I'd go with it. I also saw there are minecraft related programming lessons[2] which sounds really neat, but I haven't looked at this in depth yet.

Anyway, I could list more tools out there, but most importantly, hearing what has and hasn't worked well when working with kids would be great!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043519

[1]: https://scratch.mit.edu/

[2]: https://code.org/minecraft

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