My third camp at Spartanburg Day School (don’t blame me, I didn’t design this page) this summer is appropriately titled “iCamp: Developing Apps for Smarties” and has around a dozen rising 6th-10th graders (girls and boys) participating. My ideal for the camp was to give the kids a good foundation is basic HTML (preferably HTML5), CSS, usable PHP and work our way into Cocoa and a little Java so that they could have something of a finished iOS app (or Android if they preferred) by Friday that they had made themselves.

I have to admit that I was a little tentative about the camp this morning because it had been so long since I had gotten my hands dirty with Xcode or even thought about how I would teach a concept like reading CSS that I thought maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew.

An hour into camp this morning (we meet for 3 hours a day), I realized that my apprehensions were, as usual, wrapped in unnecessary fears as the kids had already begun building fascinating web pages in HTML5 (including video tags) and working confidently in Xcode. To be honest, I was shocked and amazed. I’m not sure why I’m ever shocked and amazed by student potential anymore.

Into our third hour of the morning, I noticed the students had begun chatting among themselves about sites like Facebook and AddictingGames.com and wondering what type of codebase they were running and how those sites ran. So, we did a few view sources and started talking about the differences in the walled garden approach of Facebook to something like Google+ (which they all really want to use evidently) and what it meant for sites heavy in Flash to be resource intensive compared to sites like YouTube which have HTML5 options based on Google’s WebM codecs… I forgot I was talking to 12-16 year olds for more than a few moments.

Oh, and it’s incredibly fun to be getting my own hands dirty with programming again. It’s not like riding a bike, but learning and being excited by this stuff with a dozen young folks is mind-bendingly fun. I couldn’t wait to crack open my old machine and check out some code I had been working on for a never-finished app that I want desperately to polish up tonight.

So no… we didn’t dig up any worms or walk amongst mother nature today (and probably won’t this week) but started dipping our toes into some very nerdy throat-beardy topics like open standards and library calls that makes me convinced we’ll have a literate population of “digital” natives that will see the forest for the trees and understand more about themselves and their circles of influences and friendships as they get their hands dirty in 1′s and 0′s. Or at least that’s one of my many prayers about the future of our culture(s).

Here’s to the Crazy (Young) Ones that hear my prayers.