Comment Re:what size group? (Score 3, Informative) 175
Indeed. I taught a "this is what programming looks like, this is what these simple loops and logic statements do, this is a large library of functions that let you do relatively complex things very easily", etc. course for a 2 week summer camp last year with kids that were 10-14. Just getting their attention to start takes a few minutes, then showing something, explaining it real quick, then asking for ideas on what else it could do worked, but for every even slightly related question there were 3-4 that had absolutely nothing to do with anything going on at all.
At then end, I did manage to get about half of them actually writing simple PHP to do stuff (they already had a HTML class), the other half ended up playing Tanki Online.