
Ask HN: Curriculum ideas for teaching programming to middle school kids - jasonkillian
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&#x27;ve never done anything like this before, so I have no idea if they&#x27;re good ideas or not. I&#x27;d love to hear the thoughts of you all on what would work well, and I&#x27;d especially love to hear the stories of what worked well people who have done similar things before.<p>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&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s quite polished enough yet to be used. I&#x27;m heavily considering using either the offline or online version of Scratch[1] but don&#x27;t know quite what direction I&#x27;d go with it. I also saw there are minecraft related programming lessons[2] which sounds really neat, but I haven&#x27;t looked at this in depth yet.<p>Anyway, I could list more tools out there, but most importantly, hearing what has and hasn&#x27;t worked well when working with kids would be great!<p>[0]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14043519<p>[1]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scratch.mit.edu&#x2F;<p>[2]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.org&#x2F;minecraft
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osullivj
Teach them Python by building a game in PyGame?

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siege_conform
Yeah Python is great for beginners I think. List of introductory books:
[https://wiki.python.org/moin/IntroductoryBooks](https://wiki.python.org/moin/IntroductoryBooks)

Some written specifically for children. Don't know much about them, but
they're worth looking into.

[https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/python-
proj...](https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/python-projects-
kids)

[https://www.nostarch.com/pythonforkids](https://www.nostarch.com/pythonforkids)

[https://www.manning.com/books/hello-
world](https://www.manning.com/books/hello-world)

[https://www.nostarch.com/teachkids](https://www.nostarch.com/teachkids)

