| The only advice I can give is to share my story. I started my son at five with MIT's Scratch [1] followed up by Lego Mindstorms [2]. I then created a text adventure engine [3] that could run adventures written in a very simple Lua based DSL so he could make a simple text game [4]. Mom helped with spelling and grammar and I suggested a puzzle but he wrote the adventure himself. Then I transitioned him to Lua on the iPad with Codea [5] and he (with a little help from me) made a game called StarFighter [6]. I choose Lua because it is a great intro language. Very simple with minimalistic syntax, few concepts, few primitives, few keywords, dynamically-typed / garbage collected, variable arity, no real gotchas, good tool support, great speed, the ability to access a key in a hash either using bracket or dotted notation, and one of the best programming books for any language (PiL). But it also scales well; closures, first-class / true anonymous functions, metatables / metamethods, nice simple API for talking between script and C, tail-call optimization, coroutines, short circuiting operators. And, the path from Lua to JavaScript is very straightforward. In fact I'd say that mastery of Lua would make you a mid-level JS programmer right out of the box... The next step was JavaScript and ImpactJS [7]. I got him two books [8][9] and he loved them. He is now doing HTML/CSS/JS and is in the middle of a fantastic book called Pro Javascript [10]. Once he is done with that book I am going to consider him on his own... But just to give you an idea; he is 11 now and I am learning Scala for work. He's been watching videos with me and I paused it and ask questions and then I asked him where he thinks the presenter is going to go. He ran to his Ubuntu desktop and apt-get'ed Scala and cranked up a REPL session and showed me; he was correct! ---- [1]: http://scratch.mit.edu/ [2]: http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/default.aspx [3]: https://github.com/shawndumas/adventure.lua [4]: https://github.com/shawndumas/adventure.lua/blob/master/theT... [5]: http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/ [6]: https://gist.github.com/shawndumas/2762088 [7]: http://impactjs.com/ [8]: http://www.amazon.com/HTML5-Game-Development-ImpactJS-Cielen... [9]: http://www.amazon.com/Building-HTML5-Games-ImpactJS-Introduc... [10]: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-JavaScript-Developers-Wro... |
I begged my parents for LEGO Mindstorms when I was a kid but we couldn't afford it. I'm hoping that he'll be as interested in learning to code as I was when I was young.