Volunteering for teaching “Introduction to Programming” to Lawrence High School students was a great experience. Every Monday, before class, we had dinner together while we talked about college and academic expectations. This group of students is awesome! They were very well behaved, respectful, and remained totally engaged in the classroom, while still managing to be funny!
We used MIT’s Scratch and Java for implementing algorithms and discussing programming concepts. Scratch was easier to set up because it runs from an USB flash drive smoothly. Java was a little bit more difficult. I installed Java on my laptop, and then copied it to an USB flash drive. I also copied JCreator to that flash drive, and configured it to use Java on that same drive. It is slow, but, it works!