

Want to volunteer to teach kids programming? - VonGuard

http://www.themade.org<p>We're a non-profit videogame museum in downtown Oakland. We teach a weekly free programming class in MIT's Scratch. The class is for 8 to 14 year olds with little to no computer skills.<p>We have 3 teachers now, but we would like to expand our stable of teachers. Ideally, we'd have enough so that everyone only had to teach a class once a month. Classes are at 10 AM, Saturday mornings, and run for 1.5 hours.<p>Our teachers need to be patient and able to work with kids, but knowledge of Scratch isn't super important. Scratch is dirt simple if you understand programming, and our existing teachers have the cirriculum down to a science: one game is taught each class. Typically that's Moon Lander, a racing game, a basketball game, and other simple 2D designs.<p>If you are interested in volunteering in downtown Oakland to help teach kids to program, please email me at alex@themade.org<p>Fringe benefits include membership to the Museum, the chance to help some very cool kids, and the opportunity to join a team of teachers that all have massive, throbbing, genius programmer brains.
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mouseroot
quit trying to teach kids with pseudo languages and actually teach them
something they can use something like python is exactly what you should be
teaching kids something they can take with them and build upon languages like
Scratch and Alice are worthless because they require you to learn the program
instead of the concepts once they get the concepts its a done deal they can
choose they're own path...its 2013 kids are smart as fuck even at a young age.

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VonGuard
We have a Python course ready to go for the kids that graduate from the
Scratch class. We just need a couple more teachers.

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aroberge
How about using rur-ple? (a Python implementation of Karel the robot which
provides a smooth transition to Python)

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mouseroot
yea expose the kids to real life problem solving, after they get the basics
they can solve thier own problems.

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cies
I did and wrote <http://edu.kde.org/kturtle>

