Learnable Programming in Thailand

First off, I grew up in Malaysia (next door neighbor to Thailand). My first time learning programming from a teacher/lecturer was rather horrid (I wish I had someone like you in my class). I have seen most of the challenges were due to the difficulty in visualizing how the codes transform to the end product.

I found Alice to be quite useful to introduce basic (types/conditional) to the first time programmer, but as soon as we transition from Alice to JAVA, many still struggled (dropout rate shot up).

If we can have a real time JAVA/C or any complied language, real time IDE. Student may not need to suffer from the pain of transitioning.

In order to avoid that I'm investigating Racket--it's powerful enough that you won't outgrow it like you would with traditional learning languages like BASIC; in fact it's much more powerful than most mainstream languages. But it's still got fantastic support for visualizations and programming with images as values, so I feel like it'd be a good choice for a next step where you wouldn't have to compromise between "serious" and "engaging". The main drawback is that while the htdp.org curriculum is pretty solid for a textbook, it's definitely not as engaging as some of the interactive curriculums like http://learn.code.org or the one shown here. But the potential there is huge.

A few years ago I donated a crap-ton of machines to a poor school in a remote part of China in conjunction with a private American NGO. I am going to visit another school with them next week and will see whether there might be scope for something similar there.

Of course, I have no idea once they have a room full of machines whether they can do much with them .. and I suspect they are probably used for games and web access exclusively. Something like you are suggesting sounds like a great use of these kinds of resources.