Addendum

A few more things that I have in the works for 2012, in no particular order of achievability (well, it's a word now!):

- participating in one/some of the Intel Teach online courses available at http://www.intel.com/about/corporateresponsibility/education/programs/elements.htm

- investigate the Google Educator online sessions (may be applicable to the USA only, and require some face-to-face contact)

- the OpenCourseWare section of MIT has published some online courses for programming featuring an introduction to short programs and coding using Python (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/), (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-189-a-gentle-introduction-to-programming-using-python-january-iap-2011/)

- starting 2012 off with Stanford University's free online Computer Science 101 course (http://www.cs101-class.org/).

In recent reading I have also come across GameStar Mechanic as advertised in the STEM Challenge website, and the Alice programming language that can be a useful precursor to other languages such as Scratch.

I feel like I need to get started on this fifteen years ago...