They're all techies of various degrees, and all have interest in programming, and all really want to learn. My company is pairing with the school system, so every other Wednesday, 4 people from my company donate an afternoon to them. It's fun because I remember being their age and wanting desperately to make a program and having no idea how to start, aside from cobbling together Hypercard stacks. I had no idea about PHP and MySQL I didn't even know what the big deal abut databases was until I was a number of months into my first job.

The trick is I'm not allowed to code at all - I can only coach and teach, and they are 100% responsible for the final product. It has this weird endless cycle about enthusiasm, though. If you get the opportunity to mentor high school kids in an area you enjoy, don't pass it up.

On a different programming-related note, I started playing with Flex today, and whipped up a Pomodoro timer, which is currently all the rage in the Agile Development community. The original method is to try and stay dead focused for 25 minutes, and then relax for 5, but the preliminary version is a 48 minute block of focus, and a 12 minute block of relax, as that's how the astounding Tim Ottinger relayed it to me.