Well, kudos to all the grey beard good guys, lovely Ada's, and makers-who-defy-labels standing your ground in the tug-of-war of words to reclaim the word "hacker" ... it looks like the flag on the rope might be starting to head back in your direction with these upcoming hack days :
National Day of Civic Hacking (June 1-2nd)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/01/22/roll-your-sleeves-get-involved-and-get-civic-hacking
Hackathon for Autism (March 22-24th)
http://www.bingfund.com/autism
One thing I like in concept about a hack day approach is it gives people a chance to learn on real world problems they have some part in choosing to do themselves. It’s open to everybody. It’s safe to fail. Worst case scenario you’re no worse off than when you started, and you probably learned something at least in the process that will help you be closer to success the next time you try. The approach of learning by picking a problem you want to solve and are passionate about and then developing whatever programming skills you need to solve it (especially if you have an experienced mentor/coach/teacher keeping you on track and helping you get unstuck) has always been more fun for me than the other way around. I cringe when someone says "I need to learn C#" and then they buy a book on C# and then try to work through it, planning to write some code at some point in the future when they finally finish the book or be ready to interview for a better job at that point. That doesn't work. Even the traditional classroom programming course doesn't work all that well in my opinion. "Hacking" in the righteous sense is hugely educational though. Pick a problem you want to solve, make that your guiding star, and then start asking questions and learning whatever it takes to solve it. You'll learn your weaknesses but that's good too. Maybe you end up signing up for a class on coursera.org to learn more. Maybe you check out 10 books on some subject from the library and end up finding 2 of them that are perfect. Maybe it forces you to polish something you were rusty on like hexadecimal vs. decimal, logical operators vs. bitwise operators, etc. Maybe halfway through getting something running in C# you'll discover a new programming language you've never heard of before, like R. Maybe it forces you to get out of your shell and ask someone else for help, and maybe that person needs your support for solving one of their problems as much as you need theirs. At the end of it, regardless of what form your solution takes, you have tools you can take with you. You're now able to hack stuff together with R or C# and you know the strengths or weaknesses of both. Maybe you even learn about how to approach problems in general, by learning about agile principles. Compared to the person who made it halfway through a single C# book before giving up out of sheer boredom or exhaustion. If you're not hungry for more, if you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!