A free programming curriculum for kids and teens (ages 9+), originally built for a weekly class at a local church. This repository contains the full curriculum: student handouts (which compile into a textbook), teacher notes, lesson code, and supporting tooling.
About 150 hours of curriculum content, designed for ages 9 and up, that takes students from no programming experience through Scratch, Python, desktop apps, 2D games, web development, and small web applications. How long that takes depends on how often the class meets — roughly 1.5-2 years at one session per week, closer to a year at twice a week. The class is free for life — students keep their machines, and they can come back any time, even years later.
The full curriculum design rationale lives in
CURRICULUM-DECISIONS.md.
Every session's handout is written as a self-contained chapter. Compiled with mdBook, the handouts become a browsable, searchable textbook. Students can use it to catch up on missed sessions, read ahead, or reference material long after the class is over.
The textbook is hosted at (GitHub Pages URL — TBD) and a local copy lives on every student's machine for offline reading.
Prerequisites: mdbook
mdbook build # builds the static site to ./book/
mdbook serve # serves locally at http://localhost:3000 with live reloadsrc/ textbook source (student-facing) — published
code/ starter code, exercises, and reference solutions
teacher/ teacher prep notes (not published)
assets/ images, diagrams, screenshots
tools/ internal scripts (session scaffolding, build helpers)
appendices/ cross-cutting reference material (in src/)
Each session has three matching artifacts:
src/phase-XX-name/session-XX-title.md— student handout (textbook chapter)teacher/phase-XX-name/session-XX-notes.md— teacher prep notescode/phase-XX-name/session-XX-name/— starter code, exercises, solutions
Solutions are intentionally public, in clearly-labeled solutions/ subdirectories. The honor-system framing: "If you peek before trying, you're cheating yourself, not me."
Open the textbook at (URL) or read the local copy on your machine. Each chapter corresponds to one class session. If you missed a session, look for the If you missed this session section near the end of the chapter — it's a self-paced version that gets you ready for next time.
The textbook's for-parents page (coming soon) explains what students will learn, when, and how. The class is free and open to kids ages 9 and up. Local logistics (where, when, who teaches) vary by instance.
This curriculum is licensed permissively because the goal is for it to be useful beyond the original church class. Fork it, adapt it, run your own class. The only ask is attribution.
- Textbook content: CC BY-SA 4.0
- Code (lesson code, scripts, tooling): MIT
If you adopt this curriculum at another church or organization, Eric would love to hear about it. Open an issue or send a pull request.
For now, this is primarily Eric's project, but corrections, typo fixes, and suggested improvements via pull request are welcome. For larger changes (new phases, restructuring), open an issue first to discuss.
All eight phases are written: Scratch, Python turtle, Python basics, intermediate Python, CustomTkinter desktop apps, Pygame, web (HTML/CSS/JS) and Flask. That is 103 chapters plus seven appendices, published as a searchable textbook at https://eric-patton.github.io/from-scratch/ and rebuilt by CI on every push.
The curriculum was written ahead of teaching it, so handouts get revised as
sessions actually run. The starter and solution code directories under code/
are scaffolded but not yet filled in.
See CURRICULUM-DECISIONS.md for the locked-in design decisions and open questions.