I co-teach a local after school club using Scratch. Kids are 9-11 and they are very much into it. The school has in classroom Chromebooks and we use the online scratch.mit.edu .
That works nicely - we have an hour and try to teach some basic point in the first few minutes and then the kids are off. It is a noisy, fun process as they kids help each other and ask us how to do things. My coteacher is a CS professor at a local engineering university.
Its a blast. Scratch allows them to make little games and animations. They honestly seem to pick it up themselves.
Another resource that I like is NoStarch press which is an imprint (right word?) of O'Reilly. They have great instruction books focused to kids and to adults teaching kids. I have a Python title as well as a Scratch and a javascript one.
Coincidentally listened to the most recent episode of "Talk Python to Me"
Professor Curran from Sydney was the guest and he has a site called Grok Learning which takes kids through a Pythin curriculum. He argues that by middle school kids should be taught a text based language. He says in the classroom he just uses the Python interpreter in a terminal.
He aludes to the fact that it is a productive exercize in that you make mistakes and show the kids a process of making mistakes and fixing them.
I liked Curran's focus on training teachers and his recent contributions to the Hour of Code are interesting. The Eliza bot example is one where you can start with a 'bunch of if statements' and refine it over time as you learn new constructs.
I hope I got his points right - TBH I listen to podcasts as I wash dishes and get kids ready for bed so missed some. A good listen though if you are intersted in this topic.
Its a blast. Scratch allows them to make little games and animations. They honestly seem to pick it up themselves.
Another resource that I like is NoStarch press which is an imprint (right word?) of O'Reilly. They have great instruction books focused to kids and to adults teaching kids. I have a Python title as well as a Scratch and a javascript one.
Coincidentally listened to the most recent episode of "Talk Python to Me"
http://www.talkpythontome.com/episodes/show/8/teaching-pytho...
Professor Curran from Sydney was the guest and he has a site called Grok Learning which takes kids through a Pythin curriculum. He argues that by middle school kids should be taught a text based language. He says in the classroom he just uses the Python interpreter in a terminal.
He aludes to the fact that it is a productive exercize in that you make mistakes and show the kids a process of making mistakes and fixing them.
I liked Curran's focus on training teachers and his recent contributions to the Hour of Code are interesting. The Eliza bot example is one where you can start with a 'bunch of if statements' and refine it over time as you learn new constructs.
I hope I got his points right - TBH I listen to podcasts as I wash dishes and get kids ready for bed so missed some. A good listen though if you are intersted in this topic.