Pimp my legos: teaching kids to program (Prentiss Riddle at SXSW)

Prentiss Riddle is working on a panel session on teaching kids to program for SXSW in Austin, TX:

It's four busy months later and we find ourselves having to put our PowerPoints where our mouths are. In addition to the experiments we are planning on our own captive guinea pigs, we're looking for two or three co-panelists in the Austin area with extensive experience teaching programming to (say) 16-and-under kids. Despite the reference to Legos in the title, we want the focus of the panel to be about software, not just killer robots (although we certainly hope to have a Mindstorms person on board). We have some sources of panelists in mind, but we hope word of mouth will provide us with more. Suggestions?

My kids aren't quite at the stage where programming is one of the things they do at the computer, but I'll be watching this one with interest. I do know that one of the best things I ever learned in school was how to type, and most of my early programming expertise had to do less with writing code from scratch and much more with playing games like Lunar Lander to try to figure out how they worked.

Comments

[Jim Benson]

That is very cool. We had a similar gift way back in the 1970s we had a similar gift with music - where a bunch of hippie rock musicians came and we built our own instruments, named them, and then invented our own musical notation to play songs with them.

Incidentally, Ed, the chinese post above this comment is spam. It's talking about registering businesses in Hong Kong.

[beth]

wow. it's exactly what i do for a living. perhaps i should contact them. i teach python, though. our lego programming is all graphical.