Interesting, how do you motivate the kids to want to learn?
That's one of those questions like "how do you play the violin" :-) There's no trick, you do it the hard way. I give lots of tiny exercises that are solvable but mildly challenging (typing, arithmetic, 2D coordinates, loops, etc). I make some simple game that fits in a screen of code, make the kids type it in from paper, then they naturally come up with tweaks and new features and add them with my help, so everyone ends up with a personalized game to show off. And so on.
(Why typing code from paper? Because kids start out unable to type. They need to practice it each lesson.)
The hardest part is getting the difficulty right, otherwise the kids run out of focus in 15 minutes and the rest of the lesson is wasted, or they solve everything too fast and get bored as well. I still get it wrong more than half the time, but when it works it feels great.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "