I teach programming in a university. We have to pull teeth to get alumni to come back to advise us, much less get them interacting with the students.

Personally, I would work on creating a school/open location that trains students to make fun things with code... games, simulations, or anything else that draws people in. I want it to be a place that is interesting so it may spark that fire that leads them to a life of programming.

Very cool, wish I had known about this before I built my own. Of course, building my own let me tailor it to the data and style I wanted (http://dustytome.net/demos/widg/).

As a side note: is there any place to get free(ish) weather forecasts? I've been using Wunderground's API (which is nice), but I don't see any way to let multiple people use it without shelling out more money than I can justify at the moment.

NOAA has an api ( http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=San+Franci... click on the red XML button down right on the page)

As someone else mentioned, so does api.met.no (they power yr.no).

World Weather Online and Weather Central are commercial offerings, but reasonably priced.

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

I love codecademy, but I always wondered if it would be better to ease a newbie into programming with a 'childrens' UI like Scratch or Alice. It wouldn't build up any coding muscle memory, but it might help them get use to the general look and feel of code before asking them to type it out themselves.

I'm really curious to know if anyone has experience with this. On the one hand, kids like building games, so Scratch and Alice seem like a good idea. On the other hand, those aren't "real" languages, so I think...why not just teach kids how to actually write code? I'm suspicious of how we dumb things down for kids. Anyone have experience teaching kids to code, either with Scratch/Alice, or another language?

yeah there's like a whole field of research and a profession devoted to the topic: computer science education