Programming activities for high school kids who have no idea what CS or programming is
- by pointdxt
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.