Programming curriculum for elderly students I have created a basic computer education project for an audience of elderly students (over 50 years old).

The course is very basic, with lessons from "How to turn on/off your home computer" to "Create your first e-mail" to basic use of the Microsoft Office suite.

After the end of those classes, some students started to look for a more advanced course, covering topics such as programming. With them in mind, we were trying to define a basic CS/programming curriculum for them.

One of the challenges here is the students' expectations:


With a hands-on/bootcamp approach we can intimidate some of them who want the course just for curiosity and not to get a new career;
On the other hand, a very theoretical course will not meet the expectations of these students who want a career change or something similar.


I know that is impossible meet everyone's expectations, but does anyone have any previous experience in the creation of a programming curriculum for an elderly audience? How can we balance the students' expectations?
If the students in this course are the same ones, or similarly educated, that finished the last course, you could be over thinking the issue. They don't yet have the exposure to know they want to become programmers.

Design the next course as an Introduction to Programming. To borrow from the course catalog for KCTCS pg. 253:


  Computational Thinking
  
  Promotes understanding of computer programming and 
  logic by teaching students to think like a computer. Covers 
  skills needed to develop and design language-independent 
  solutions to solve computer-related problems. Covers 
  development and design basics including use of variables, 
  control and data structures, and principles of command-
  line and object-oriented languages.


That should give the enough knowledge to choose programming as a second career if they want. As an alternative, you could do web page development. That gives a faster return on their work, and allows you to also cover programming using JavaScript. Web page creation is something that more of your audience can potentially utilize in personal life, without having to make a career out of it.

As a third course you could get into the theory and "nitty-gritty" of programming.