For the past few months I've been mentoring kids and presenting to classrooms on how fun it can be to work as an engineer. Earlier this year I took on an apprentice via the Spark program. For 10 weeks, Alex, a 13 year old from East LA, came to our shop and we programmed games together. In no time we had Pong and Breakout clones.

We learned the limitations of Scratch (e.g. no programmatic creation of sprites) but it didn't matter — Scratch is an amazing tool for teaching kids how to program. Its all-in-one nature makes it easy for anyone to pick up. Next we started on PacMan, which proved much more difficult given the boundary detection and the logic of the ghosts. Alex did a great job and the whole experience taught me a lot about how to teach programming.

I highly recommend this experience to any professional. Spark will hook you up with a kid who wants to go into your field and there is almost no substitute for direct mentorship. NFTE is another great program that pairs professionals with kids wanting to start their own businesses.

Tools to learn how to program

• MIT Scratch — Cross platform tool that makes programming easy
• Codecademy — Easy to follow, online lessons
• PeepCode — Programming tutorial screencasts
• Drawbot — Mac OSX tool to teach Python

Tools to learn electronics

• Modkit — A Scratch-like interface that makes it easy to program microcontrollers (specifically Arduino)
• LittleBits — A LEGO-like construction set to make simple electronics interactions

Resources for Robots

• FIRST — Middle and high school robot competitions
• Thymio — Small robot for teaching

Other interesting resources

• Institute of Play — A group dedicated to helping kids learn
• GameDesk — An organization using game play and game mechanics to rethink education
• Gamestar Mechanic — A tool that simplifies building your own game