Ask HN: Resources to teach high schoolers to code?

I have a friend in NYC who has volunteered to teach high schoolers programming this summer. She's a public school teacher with limited resources, but she's been given free rein to teach whatever she wants, and asked me for guidance.

Her goal is to get the kids building basic web apps by the end of the summer. It's an ambitious goal but I think it's doable. Some resources I suggested so far:

* code.org for free curricula and guidance

* glitch.com as an easy and fun platform to start building web apps

Are there any other good tools she should check out? Any organizations in the NYC area that could help her? Thanks!

Here's some additional resources

Web Apps: - freecodecamp - codeacademy

That's all I really got for now :)

Taught programming to high school students for twenty years....

I liked using a bunch of projects with increasing difficulty that students could move through at their own pace. The difference in coding aptitude is really quite astonishing.

I wrote a blog post explaining how I used to teach beginners in tremendous detail: https://grahammitchell.com/writings/how-i-teach-beginners.ht...

I'm not a big fan of CodeCademy; it's seductive but the kids end up not knowing how to do very much at the end.

Khan Academy has a decent HTML/CSS/JavaScript curriculum. I never personally used it with students because I wasn't teaching Web Development anymore once they rolled it out. However, I think it looks pretty good. Might be a little fast for some kids.

Anyway, hope that helps.

When I was in high school we used BASIC and then Turing to learn basic instructions. With Turing we were able to learn to draw some basic graphics to the screen, etc. I'm not sure how applicable it would be to web app cases, but it was at least a little engaging at the time.

http://tristan.hume.ca/openturing/

To build a full web app for the first time without previous exposure could get messy quickly given the current landscape. Maybe start with a simpler website that includes laying out some HTML, styling it, and adding some basic front-end interactivity.

If there's a pre existing server that they could interact with, maybe that would help with encouraging them by giving them more immediate results without skimming too much of the detail into what they're actually building, rather than just learning too much by rote.

A bit of a search pointed me to Udemy which has a free course covering HTML/CSS laid out already. It wouldn't be too hard to build on something like that to show how Javascript interacts with elements on a web page.

https://www.udemy.com/build-your-first-website-in-1-week/

This blog has some good ideas about teaching Python to high school students: http://blog.jrheard.com/