A lesson format that can be adapted to any grade level in middle school (and perhaps beyond). Students create an interactive animation to review the roots of words.
Students create function machine programs and challenge each other to figure out the function from the inputs and outputs. Basics of Scratch, includes simple lists.
After teaching students some basics (stage, sprites, costumes, loops, movement, ask/answer, broadcast/receive, variables), I challenged them to create their own projects.