Re: The Coding Frenzy @JakePepper
You have a point, but the issue is identifying the kids who have a genuine interest. It's a chicken-and-egg scenario. unless you get them to try it, many kids won't know that they can do it, so given the choice won't select it as an area of study.
The main aim of teaching something like BASIC was to find out, using a language that is simple enough so that it can be grasped quite quickly who can de-construct a problem and work out how to get the computer to solve it. Once someone can do this, they can progress to something more complicated.
Trying to teach any sort of programming is difficult today. 30 years ago, writing Animal, Vegetable or Mineral or Mastermind was a real achievement, but could be done using something like BASIC on your average home PC after some hours of study. People doing it could be proud, and show of their skills.
Now, you need to be able to do something really flashy with fancy graphics and moving images for anybody to feel like they've achieved anything worthwhile. The step from writing loops with text output to a FPS is so vast, that most kids, who have the attention span of a goldfish, can never make it, and will give up before they've even started.
I would like to go back to using a simple language like BASIC, for all it's shortcomings, to teach. Get the kids to learn what an integer or string text variable is before trying to teach complex data objects with attached methods. How in hell are they supposed to know how a method is applied to a complex object, if they don't even know that a name in the program represents a quantity/number/string etc. And that is what you get if you try to teach using Java or Python as a first language.
I admit that it is difficult to get them to see that what they are doing is worthwhile, but the old adage of "Don't run before you can walk" appears to be appropriate here!