| Hot Wheels has cars with NFC chips in them, and they're only about $5 a car. You could teach him how to make a stats tracker to compare his favorite cars, see which are the fastest, and which perform the best over time, with a cheap NFC reader you could place under tracks. You could even get some old-fashioned character LCD displays, make a little scoreboard and teach him how to print the winners on it. If you're willing to learn to teach him something, it wouldn't even be that hard to get into hardware a little to make programmable tracks, and that'd be a relatively cheap hobby to share with him. Some cheap actuators from Digikey or Mouser and a $250 3D printer (which is an incredible tool to have if you're frequently around children anyway), and not only is he set with skills that'll make so much of his life easier, it'll probably be more interesting to him right now than making a card game. Remember, hacker culture and everything that's downstream of it (like the free software movement) came about not because people were trying to prepare themselves for the workforce or from ambition, but because people wanted to make their toy trains run on time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club If he likes toy cars, then please, please, please find the intersection of your love of computing and his love of cars. It's not a bad sign that he cares about Hot Wheels, that's actually amazing! There's a lot of cool ways to introduce technology to a love of cars, and the types of projects that exist in the intersection of programming and cars are incredibly useful for understanding computers on an intimate level. You can work on tracks and scoreboards like I mentioned, or you could take his Hot Wheels and help him turn his favorites into RC cars. https://hackaday.com/2020/08/12/scratch-build-of-this-tiny-r... https://hackaday.com/2021/04/23/modding-a-hot-wheels-car-int... If you want to go big, when he gets a bit bigger there are even more projects you could do. A simple ride-on kids' car (think a Power Wheels clone) is completely doable by someone of your vocation. If that seems like a bit too much for you, then you could always help him walk through a tutorial on how to make a self-driving RC car: https://ori.codes/ I'm not hugely into cars; none of this is stuff that requires knowing about them to help your kid with. Please consider doing so; you seem like a really well-intentioned parent, and taking advantage of a kid's interests really helps when trying to teach them things. Thanks for caring about teaching him computing; genuine enthusiasm to share your love of something with a child can make a world of difference. |