Will of the People

I am starting to pull together materials to teach programming on Youtube (seeing all the awesome things KhanAcademy and Vi Hart, among many others, have done for education makes me think I should be giving back in some way). Those of you who have poked around on my websites have probably noticed that I already have (or in the past had) some stuff up; I'm hoping to pull all that together over the next few months into a dedicated educational subdomain of my website, ideally erasonably separate from the philosophy and advocacy stuff (the latter of which is mostly gone by this point).

Here's my first shot at a lesson plan/structure. As many of you are either programmers or can at least knock out some code when you need to, comments would be appreciated. I expect to do roughly the same thing at some point with my intro to unix documents (which a few of you have seen).

Voila

==Principles/Structure==

• Alternate hands-on and theory
• Try to be reasonably programming-language agnostic, but procedural/OO centrism is okay
• For actual code examples, we'll do them in parallel in both Perl and Python
• Make it easy for others to add their own examples for a lesson in other languages, webpages should accomodate that (crediting those who contribute, na klar)
• Basic format will be Youtube combined with written material and a website
• Public domain or at least some really open license that permits forking, editing, republishing, and the like. I'd be ok with a license that required attribution of some kind and is viral

• Basic output
• Hello, world
• Running a program
• Simple maths (use immediates; no variables yet)
• Variables
• Storing things into variables, doing calculations on them
• Outputting variables
• Validation
• Stepping back: General structure of a program
• Functions
• Let's make some functions
• Let's see how functions are documented
• Builtin and language functions
• How can we find out what we have available?
• Where can we find good documentation for existing functions?
• Organising code
• What are the best ways to organise functions?
• Let's do a project!
• Variable scope
• How scope works with functions
• The stack
• Immediates are not variables
• A bit more about immediates
• Talking to other programs (an introduction)
• Recursion
• More on data types
• Data structures
• Let's do another project!

• Handling files
• Databases
• Programs running in unusual environments (in a web server? browser?)
• GUIs
• and so on

Thoughts? This is an early draft; I haven't decided what good projects would be yet. Also, if for some reason you want to claim this as much as I am and collaborate with me on it, that'd be great!