Ask HN: Please help me teach CS to a HS student from a very different background

Hey Everyone, I am teaching CS to a student from an interventionist high school in one of the poorest urban neighborhoods, who has foster parents which nag him at home and who is in a constant battle to ward off bad influences (drugs, alcohol etc) in his neighborhood. He is definitely motivated and talented, and is in ok academic standing. I am trying to get teach him basic concepts of CS/web programming through the summer, and hopefully continue on through the school year. In order to teach him CS, his teachers and I devised a plan of getting him an internship at my company. The reason for that is to have him work mostly during school hours at the school building so that he does not have any distractions since we are not located in the same city. We communicate through hangouts, chats, messages etc throughout the day, so location hasn't been an issue as of yet.

I would really like recommendations from the community about which curriculum and coursework they have used in teaching high school students CS. In particular, I am really interested in learning what specific curriculum paths some of you have used in the past and what online resources you have used to achieve that. My thoughts on an 8-week curriculum are the following:

1. HTML/CSS for 1.5 weeks 2. Javascript 2-3 weeks 3. Setup environment 2 days 4. Make a webpage 1 week 5. Jquery 1 week 6. Intro to Python 1 week The reason this is important to get right, is that the teachers and I really want to show other students in the school how programming can enable them to create something and change their lives. There are thousands of resources on the internet but most of these students never choose to learn CS and do not have any inclination to. We are hoping to change that bit by bit. Hopefully it works.

One thing I'd say is that for the first week, don't go too deep into theory or even syntax. Have him work with tools like MIT's Scratch or Scirra's Construct to build games and in the process, learn how to think in a programmatic manner. Then, once he's interested and hooked, take him through your planned curriculum.

Source: I'm a 16 year old who got hooked on to programming a while ago.

Might I recommend processing.js? It's got a very shallow learning curve even to first-time programmers, there's plenty of support for it, it requires little setup, and lets you create visual applications immediately. If you use https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/cs, KhanAcademy's processing.js curriculum/editor, you'll have no setup, documentation, and lots of examples to look off of. I've been using it for a while now and suggest it to most first-time programmers because of how easy it makes it to get into programming and start building things immediately. Not that a big name necessarily means anything, but John Resig, creator of jQuery, created processing.js and is an employee of KhanAcademy, writing their editor.

This class on Coursera is likely to engage a young person.

https://www.coursera.org/course/digitalmedia

In my opinion it's better to use the work product of seasoned professionals than that of even the most well intentioned amateurs. There are 10x teachers. There are 100x curricula. Being smart isn't expertise.

Good luck.

I am using codehs, codeacademy

Treehouse is very similar to other ones, Odin Project seems to be for older learners. Bentobox is fantastic! Thanks for the rec!