I don't want to make my own currency, at least not yet. I'm just wanting to take the first step in learning how to. I've already learnt quite a bit about cryptography and its implementation. I did my undergrad in IT Sec, so that was a help.
There are several teams I'm following at the moment, so I'll try and contribute to some of them. Thanks for the tips!
How far have you managed to get? Even the ScroogeCoin assignment for the cryptocurrency course (@coursera offered by Princeton) wasn't very straightforward. Then again I had more difficulty with Java than anything else. Haven't done anything serious with Java for 7 years now.
I'm even willing to put some BTC towards an alt-coin demo. If it documents well, and explains differences (e.g. between this abc-coin and Litecoin from which it was forked) then all the better.