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[Dave Cragg]

On 11 Aug 2011, at 23:01, Judy Perry wrote:
> If you had a month, meaning, 4 long sessions or 8 shorter sessions, to get an absolute Joe Public to make something small but semi-interesting in LC, i.e., something they couldn't do in PowerPoint, what are the top 5 things you'd want them to learn about programming?

Back when I was at school, I remember we had a chance to do a chemistry project that wasn't on the regular curriculum. We had a choice of projects, making alcohol, making an explosive, and I don't remember the other choices, which is probably significant. No educational goals were presented to us, and it's still not clear whether the teacher had any in mind. All in all, it was successful. I was in one of the alcohol groups. We discovered that failure could be enjoyable and educational. (Do you know difficult it is to extract starch from potatoes?)

So along these lines, I was wondering whether there are any programming projects that might attract the interest of x-year olds. (You didn't give us the age of the students.)

- Personality survey (What questions would you ask to discover  someone's personality. Interface for delivering questions. Methods for collecting/storing answers.  Some logic for identifying certain personality types. Methods for aggregating data and presenting results.)

- Image manipulator. (Provide an image of someone wearing a pink (for example) tee shirt. They must devise a program that allows  the color of the tee shirt to be changed.)

Ideas all dried up...

> some of them barely know how to do attachments with email


That doesn't stope me trying to program. :-)

Dave