In his OSCON 2008 presentation, “Spawning the Next Generation of Hackers,” Nathan Torkington proposes that each one of us should go to our local school and volunteer – unless you’re a pervert. Then, you should stay home.

In his proposal, he prompts us to seek out some teachers and find out what they need from a technology perspective. And volunteer to run a computer club and teach some programming. He champions Scratch as the programming language of choice, which happens to have a dedicated resource for Scratch educators.

A few interesting bits from the audio…

… On teaching children to program versus playing outside, Torkington says, “You can learn to program AND you can run around outside. There are 24 hours in a day.”

… He praised Scratch for it’s accessibility, syntax free environment, and immediate results. I thought it was interesting that after his own son reached the limits of Scratch, he moved on to Processing. It’s only really interesting because I was just looking at Processing last week.

… “Teachers need teaching. It’s not just the kids” says Nathan. It’s along this vein that I wrote Scratch 1.4 Beginner’s Guide. There is, after all, nothing wrong with learning.

Listen to the MP3 (some profanity). I found this talk via the Media Downloads Queue blog thanks to Google Alerts.