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My wife is a high school maths teacher, and is considering starting a programming club for 13-17 years olds who show an interest. Their interest seems to be around Apps and Android which I have little experience of.

The kids would be (presumably) interested in programming, and have a fairly high level of computing knowledge. We would provide them with resources and some knowledge, but hopefully a lot would be self guided. I'm hoping stack overflow'ers can provide some tips or starting points. Specific things I think I'll need are;

  • A development Environment; Currently I'm looking towards Java and Android, developed in Eclipse, probably installed on donated older hardware

  • Some initial direction; There seem to be a plethora or 'start android' tutorials, so some recommendations for good ones are valuable, as are recommended paper books

  • A Target; Some final project they should be shooting for

  • A Route; This is where I'm most stuck, how to lead them through the required Java concepts and learning they would need

Some related questions already out there
Language+IDE for teaching high school students?
Teaching "web design/development" to high-school home-school group. Good sources?
How can I bootstrap a software development community at my school?

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Why Java/Android? Is it sensible if you dont have experience? – Dave Hillier Sep 8 '12 at 15:55
This is a quite deprived area, and its very hard to get kids to attend non-compulsory things, so keeping their interest is seen as key. They expressed an interest in coding apps for their phones, which they saw as Android (iPhone's being out of their price league generally) – PaulHurleyuk Sep 8 '12 at 20:06
You could try searching for a CoderDojo nearby. They usually don't enforce an IDE or something like that and when you're starting out you don't need one. There is nothing wrong with kids starting to code with something simple as Notepad. The goal is to get them started with some code and be creative with it. – Spoike Sep 9 '12 at 0:03

1 Answer

If you're looking for Java based teaching then the Greenfoot and Alice are the way to go. You can also look at taking students through codeacademy as an intro to programming in general.

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