Hi all. My son is eleven years old and I'm looking into a good way to get him passionate about computer science and programming. There are a lot of resources out there. Does anyone have a recommendation on the best?
If your son is passionate about technology and computers, direct him to learning to code the hard way series. Or pick up a book that will teach programming by creating a series of simple games.<p>If he his not, stop trying to live vicariously through him.
Get him one of these <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition" rel="nofollow">http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition</a> - and nothing else, no PC, no games console, no smartphone. When I were a lad, we made our own fun. Out of rocks. And we liked it that way.
Here are some ideas (and we've used pretty much all of them)<p>Alice, from Randy Pausch (<a href="http://www.thelastlecture.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thelastlecture.com/</a>) team
<a href="http://alice.org/" rel="nofollow">http://alice.org/</a><p>Scratch
<a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://scratch.mit.edu/</a><p>Codea--programming on the iPad. I highly recommend getting a keyboard.
<a href="http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/" rel="nofollow">http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/</a><p>Art of Problem Solving has online programming classes
<a href="http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/School/courseinfo.php?course_id=cs:intro" rel="nofollow">http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/School/courseinfo.php?cou...</a><p>Good luck!
Resources about programming won't make a child passionate about it.<p>If he's interested, spending time with him doing some Alice or Kodu might have an effect over the long term.<p>But passions and interests build over time and at age 11 are heavily influenced by the interests of peers.