Programming activities for high school kids who have no idea what CS or programming is

Posted by pointdxt on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by pointdxt
Published on 2010-03-12T21:42:08Z Indexed on 2010/03/12 21:47 UTC
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I work at a small high school that's in a very high poverty area. There are only a handful of seniors that are thinking about applying to be an engineer of some sort in college and only 1 kid that applied for Computer Science (he has a couple acceptances so far!). He's been talking to me a lot as I majored in Computer Science as well and he is very excited about it. Unfortunately, our school doesn't have a Computer Science course of any kind so he asks me a lot of stuff.

I want to help him out since he's really excited about majoring in CS but I don't know where to begin. I could say put Linux on a computer, go online and go research stuff like I did but this kid needs some direction and he doesn't even know what Linux is let alone have a free computer around for that sort of thing. He doesn't know much about CS but is keenly interested in having a computer do all sorts of things but I don't know how to help him in a meaningful way. Any advice? I'm not a teacher at the school so I'm not a great educator, I do IT at the school.

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