Her goal is to get the kids building basic web apps by the end of the summer. It's an ambitious goal but I think it's doable. Some resources I suggested so far:
* code.org for free curricula and guidance
* glitch.com as an easy and fun platform to start building web apps
Are there any other good tools she should check out? Any organizations in the NYC area that could help her? Thanks!
I liked using a bunch of projects with increasing difficulty that students could move through at their own pace. The difference in coding aptitude is really quite astonishing.
I wrote a blog post explaining how I used to teach beginners in tremendous detail: https://grahammitchell.com/writings/how-i-teach-beginners.ht...
I'm not a big fan of CodeCademy; it's seductive but the kids end up not knowing how to do very much at the end.
Khan Academy has a decent HTML/CSS/JavaScript curriculum. I never personally used it with students because I wasn't teaching Web Development anymore once they rolled it out. However, I think it looks pretty good. Might be a little fast for some kids.
Anyway, hope that helps.
https://glitch.com/learn-to-code
http://tristan.hume.ca/openturing/
To build a full web app for the first time without previous exposure could get messy quickly given the current landscape. Maybe start with a simpler website that includes laying out some HTML, styling it, and adding some basic front-end interactivity.
If there's a pre existing server that they could interact with, maybe that would help with encouraging them by giving them more immediate results without skimming too much of the detail into what they're actually building, rather than just learning too much by rote.
A bit of a search pointed me to Udemy which has a free course covering HTML/CSS laid out already. It wouldn't be too hard to build on something like that to show how Javascript interacts with elements on a web page.
https://www.udemy.com/build-your-first-website-in-1-week/
Showing how they can modify websites they visit - even if just to replace a phrase on the homepage of their school's website with something else, like legal graffiti - can interest them in one kind of code - web code. It's not the only or even most important kind of programming, but it's highly accessible/relatable to high schoolers.
[1]: https://hackclub.com/
* games list: https://medium.mybridge.co/12-free-resources-learn-to-code-w...
* side bar of this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingforkids/
* also this Q&A site: https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes
Scratch is a visual environment that will teach the basic of algorithms, loops, decisions, variables etc. using just drag and drop. It has sprites, sounds and everything you need to create rich flash games that can be exported to the web, so coding it's very rewarding, here is what a 12 y/o can create: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/203422373/
Aimed at 10-12, but easily caters to other ages too.
Have a look at the tutorials below...
https://codeclubprojects.org/en-GB/
Web Apps: - freecodecamp - codeacademy
That's all I really got for now :)