[cbanek]

Sometimes people with autism have a "special interest" that they are highly interested in and can easily hyperfocus on - like you mention Legos (I love those too by the way). If you can tie in the the special interest, that may help with the focus / attention span?

[Alpha2020]

You are right, he loves math but his language is weak. Trying to see on how to leverage that interest. At some point language is needed to understand and solve math problems where he gets lost.

As an aside, he has an obsession with prime numbers. If allowed, he would sit down and play with prime number calculator forever to see if a number is prime and look up its prime factors. Now, given a number up to 10000, he can tell the factors from memory.

Will check on the Legos connection.

[cbanek]

Searching for prime numbers is a really good CS problem actually, and one algorithm that is very easily coded by a 1st semester student is the Sieve of Eratosthenes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes

Some other ideas of math + cs are things like visualizations, maybe doing visualizations of equations like fractals could be interesting.

I'm also reminded of a recent HN submission (though can't find it off hand) that the part of the brain that reads code isn't actually the same as the one that parses language! I just found that interesting.

Good luck and Merry Christmas!