Have you heard of Code Club¹? It's aimed at 9-11 year olds, so younger than your audience, but you might want to examine their curriculum. They work in Scratch,

Have you heard of Code Club¹? It's aimed at 9-11 year olds, so younger than your audience, but you might want to examine their curriculum. They work in Scratch, and AFAIK focus more on "programmer thinking" - understanding conditionals, loops, and events. There's also the Logo turtles². I think the most important elements are fun, immediacy of feedback, and relevance. When you're working with Scratch you can see what happens immediately, and it makes it easy to explore changes. ("What happens if I change this number? What happens if I invert this conditional?" etc.) Making your own game or making a robot move is far more interesting and relevant than printing text or working with test data. ¹ https://www.codeclub.org.uk/ https://www.codeclub.org.uk/ ² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(robot) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(robot)