[Edu-sig] Elementary School Instruction

[Andy Judkis]

I am winding up my first year as a high school technology teacher, after 20+ 
years as an engineer and programmer.  I teach 10th graders (ages 15 or 16) 
in a magnet high school for kids interested in medical careers.  The school 
is competive to get into, and while the students are not all brilliant, the 
average ability is better than the population as a whole -- FWIW, average 
SATs are in the low 600s.

For better or worse, I've gotten to put together my curriculum, and I have 
included a 3-4 week introduction to Python programming as part of it.  We 
have block scheduling, so 4 weeks is about 30 hours in the classroom -- not 
a trivial amount of time.

I have worked very hard to put something together, and many of the kids just 
don't get it.  Last semester I started off with the Livewires materials, but 
almost immediately discovered that the kids were helpless whenever the 
materials said "now how would you do x?"  So I walked them through it.  If I 
gave them a trivial problem to solve that required them to recognize that 
some sort of looping would be required. . .  forget it.  This semester I 
started the unit off with a week of RUR-PLE, which I thought would help a 
lot.  RUR-PLE is a very nice piece of work, and it's a very good way for the 
kids to dip their toes into the pool.  It helped, but seeing where they are 
now -- well, they still don't get it at all.  Even the difference between
        var = "hello"
and
        var = hello
or
        print foo()
and
        print foo
isn't really sinking in.  I show examples, I give them exercises to do, I 
have them work together, but very few of them seem to build any 
understanding.  So the idea that much younger kids are grasping syntax like 
this:
  >>> thewords = {'noun1':'house', 'noun2':'mouse'}
  >>> print "In this %(noun1)s there lives a %(noun2)s." % thewords
makes me weep in frustration.  When I first mentioned that I was planning to 
teach some programming, a more experienced teacher at the school immediately 
said "Oh, you can't teach these kids programming, you'll have to spoon-feed 
them all the way."  At the time, I dismissed that notion, but now I'm 
wondering if she isn't right.

So, my question is, if you wanted a group of certainly-not-stupid 16 year 
old kids to at least get a taste of programming, understanding that many of 
them are there because it's a required course, and they're not predisposed 
to be interested in it, what would you do?  What is a minimal set of things 
they ought to be exposed to?  How much time would you spend on it?  What do 
you think they ought to be able to do at the end of the time?

Thanks,
    Andy