Found some help

So I've been frustrated with the lack of support and interest in teaching kids computer programming, or at least teaching elementary age kids programming. However there have been some exciting developments that might help me in my quest.

First, the elementary school my daughters attend was able to raise $23,000 at the school's PTA auction to bring iPads and WiFi to the classrooms. I admit the iPad might not be the ideal environment to learn computer programming, but there is CODEA, which I haven't fully explored, but it looks like a pretty cool environment to work in. They've written at least one pretty cool game using CODEA called Cargo-Bot that is designed to help teach some principles of computer programming. I mentioned all of this to my oldest daughters teacher whose class was the test case for using iPads in the classroom.

Second, I just found out that PluralSight is offering a couple of free online courses to help kids learn computer programming. The first is Learning How to Program with Scratch, which is the language I've been exploring with my daughters. The second course they have might be a bit more hard core; Teaching Kids Programming. The description says "Use this course to teach your kids to program with C#." I haven't viewed either of these courses, but we subscribe to PluralSight at work and I've used several of their training courses. The courses are very complete, and I look forward to exploring them with my older daughter.

EDIT: Just checked out the introduction to Teaching Kids Programming. It was developed by TeachingKidsProgramming.org which offers course ware to help teach kids programming ...as suggested by the name ;-) This course was developed was specifically for PluralSight, designed for parents to use in teaching their children (not necessarily teachers). It is designed for kids 10 and up, and they assume that it will mostly be parents who are developers teaching this so it uses Visual Studio and C#. Pretty Cool!