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This is great. I'm working with a local elementary school teacher this fall to teach kids (9-10 year olds) programming. We plan to use Scratch as it gives immediate results and demonstrates many core programming concepts (variables, loops, conditionals, etc). If they take to it very quickly, we may try a real programming language.

If anyone has experience teaching kids this age programming, or if you know of any resources available, please let me know. This is a new experience for me.



Khan Academy has a pretty amazing live environment inside the browser: http://khanacademy.org/cs

It's been tested to work pretty well with middle school children, so it seems right up your alley. John Resig (creator of jQuery) made it happen, his blog post on it: http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/


Two new books on the way from No Starch Press: Super Scratch Programming Adventure (http://nostarch.com/scratch -- available now) and Python for Kids (http://nostarch.com/pythonforkids -- available soon).

The Scratch book is probably appropriate for ages 8 and up, the Python one for ages 10 and up (depending on the kid, of course).

Disclaimer: I work as an editor for No Starch.


Oh, and Computer Science Unplugged has a ton of fantastic exercises for kids in that age group: http://csunplugged.org/


I would absolutely love to be involved in a project like that one. Been wanting to develop one locally, and this might be the push I needed. Good luck with the project, and keep me update on how it progresses. My email is in my profile.


http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

Especially check out the footnote, A Scheme Story:

http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html


Hackety Hack! comes most quickly to mind: http://hackety.com/




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