Background:

I teach high school digital technologies in Western Australia, and while our earlier and later year curriculum is pretty prescriptive as to content (year 7-8 and year 11-12), there's a bit of opportunity to do different stuff in the middle years. The 11-12 Computer Science course tends to be aimed at just that (database theory, networking, introductory programming, some basic architecture, and some software engineering), but we don't tend to get a very high uptake.

I've been thinking about how to offer something around the year 9-10 level where we have a bit more freedom in what we deliver and how we do it, and would like to put together something which can help out those aiming at further studies in Science and Mathematics. However, my background isn't really that great in these areas, and the introductory courses I did as part of my CS degree are a) from the 90s; and b) not really that useful for what I want to do now.

So, my question is: are there any good resources which people could recommend which I could use to give high school students (and myself) a good grounding in practical applications of programming in non-compsci fields? A lot of the data analysis courses I've looked into have started at a higher level than my students (and myself to be honest) would cope with well.