I just finished teaching Bootstrap (http://www.bootstrapworld.org http://www.bootstrapworld.org) in an after-school program at 2 middle schools: one in inner-ci

I just finished teaching Bootstrap (http://www.bootstrapworld.org http://www.bootstrapworld.org) in an after-school program at 2 middle schools: one in inner-city Oakland and the other in Daly City. The Bootstrap curriculum doesn't look anything what you describe. The students start off writing simple expressions and then move on to writing some core functions in a 2D side-scrolling video game. It's not only an introduction to programming, but also a concrete application of algebra to a problem that many kids are passionate about -- making a video game. For most, or maybe all, of the students in my Oakland class (6th- and 7th-graders), it was their first encounter with variables, functions and abstract thinking, e.g., accomplishing animation by performing math operations on variables representing idealized x/y coordinates. There were attendance problems in Oakland due mainly to external factors, like parents not wanting their kids walking home after dark. Only 7 of the original 13 Oakland students finished the class, compared to 12 out of 14 in Daly City, but everyone who finished the class in both Oakland and Daly City had a working program by the end of the 10-week course. I think it's fair to say that all of the students who finished have a reasonably good understanding of some basic computer science concepts: functions, variables, applying operators to values, evaluating expressions, and a simple notion of types (strings, numbers, booleans and "images"). The obvious next steps would be iteration/recursion and some simple compound data structures, but we didn't have time for that in just 10 lessons, which is all that this particular after-school program permitted. My point is this: middle school students can handle a fairly rigorous approach to introductory computer science. Saying we shouldn't teach something because it will be taught poorly is no excuse not to teach it the right way -- we just need people qualified to do that. That's the real problem, but most of you who're reading this could help do something about that by volunteering to teach a curriculum like Bootstrap.