After a bit of tension over securing a room, someone sorted us out and I will therefore be teaching another introduction to programming with Python, to a group of beginners, starting Monday! Exciting. I have a draft of everything I want to do on the first day, I need to print it out proper before the end of the week as we probably won't have Internet access during the class. I'll be teaching adults again. The class that I meant to cap at 8 students now has 10, admire my ability to say "No" :) (Update: Though I'm told only 5 confirmed for this Monday! Typical.) Hope it works out.

In the meantime, here are a couple of interesting links about teaching programming to kids, that I want to be able to find again later:

• Teaching Kids to Program, or Don't Try to Teach 8-Year-Olds Java Subclassing. High-level, describes a way to get involved with schools and different approaches to teach kids to program (surprisingly, or not when you think about it, programming Lego Mindstorms proved a failure. For robots perhaps programming Roombas would work better, as they should be less prone to randomness... (?))
• Umonya. This sounds like my "crash course" idea but on steroids and targeting kids, which makes it a ton more awesome and about that much more scary-insane. The presentation I was linked to says 18h + 6h optional over one week-end, which is... wow!

Both these links actually come from recent posts on the WoMoz mailing list, which seems to be straying from "getting more women involved in Mozilla projects" toward generally steering and encouraging women, girls, and young people in general towards programming. Interesting.