Ask Slashdot: How Do I Engage 5th-8th Graders In Computing?

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 30, 2015 @09:01AM from the robots-with-lasers dept.

An anonymous reader writes: I volunteer at a inner-city community after school program focused K-8th grade. Right now, due to the volunteer demographic, we spend most of our activity time in arts and crafts and homework. The 5th-8th students are getting restless with those activities. I've been asked to spice it up with some electrical wizardry. What I'd like to do is introduce the students to basic jobs skills through computers. My thoughts are that I could conduct some simple hands-on experiments with circuits, and maybe some bread boards. Ultimately, we're going to take apart a computer and put it back together. How successful this project is will dictate whether or not we will go into programming. However, whatever we do, I want the kids to obtain marketable skills. Anyone know of a curriculum I can follow? What experiences have you had with various educational computing projects?

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Scratch by Anonymous Coward · 2015-01-30 09:23 · Score: 5, Informative

I run a computer club at our local elementary school. MIT's Scratch has been an amazing resource for teaching the kids to program. It's fun, it's graphical, and it provides a platform for teaching most major CS concepts. We did tear a computer down, but we only spent one meeting on that. I think much more than that is overkill. The kids really enjoy the programming in scratch.