Standard tutorials have too much information to be appropriate in introductory courses; try using excerpts from them or creating your own.
Teach hierarchical task analysis using Requirement Cards to sort through 100 requirements engineers have created for a robot cleaning up a nuclear disaster.
Build a paper airplane instead of the PB&J exercise for a less messy, more extensible algorithms introduction activity.
Give students, especially younger kids, “movement breaks” so that they don’t have to sit still and stare at a computer for too long.
When learning in a playful context, students are less likely to be frustrated by difficulty or failure.
Have some students pretend to be robots while other students program them to complete simple tasks to practice debugging and to emphasize the importance of coding precisely.
Use examples that have nothing to do with computers to introduce new CS concepts in an accessible way.
DrJava, the Java interpreter, gives students an interactive environment to practice testing strategies in.
Demonstrate swapping variables' values by swapping the contents of two cups full of liquid; you need a third cup to swap the liquids just like you need a third, temporary, variable to swap the values.
To avoid frustrating students, give them definitions of common terms and ways of fixing common error messages in advance.