[imns]

Don't you think he will get bored sitting in a chair next to me for 8 hours, staring at code that is way above his head? I fear he won't get much of that and since he's going into computer science I want to make it exciting for him.

[stevejalim]

While what I'm about to suggest may well hamper your coding productivity that day, why not 'think aloud' as much as possible that day and narrate [the core of] what you're doing? Help your brother get a better idea of the kind of decisions that you're making and how you're solving problems.

[Mz]

It is very possible you are underestimating him. A lot can be picked up from context. There are plenty of discussions on HN about how hard it is to learn to code and that there is "something missing" from current methods for teaching it. Since he can ask questions, assuming you are someone he feels comfortable "bugging", the odds are good he can decide for himself how much to ask and when in order to foster actual understanding.

I learned to code when someone hand-coded a small site for me and then gifted me the code. My then husband was double majoring in history and computer science. He had to explain FTP program to me and some other very basic things. Then I began playing with the code by just substituting color codes for the ones already there and seeing what it did. This is not very different from my school experience with French where they would give you a sentence ("The house is red") and have you substitute the one descriptor ("The house is blue", "The house is yellow").

Perhaps he will be bored. Or perhaps this will be a unique learning opportunity for him. Helen Keller learned to sign in spite of being both deaf and blind and a small child. Her parents already had some homemade "signs" for her to use to engage in crude communication and the teacher was just persistent in signing things into her hand over and over and over until, one day, she realized the signs had meaning. It just suddenly clicked. Then she ran around asking, in essence, "What's this?!" and "What's this?!" about everything she could get her hands on.

We don't fully understand how that happens, but it does.

FWIW: I homeschooled my two gifted-learning disabled sons for many years. My oldest thinks in pictures and needs broad context before the details make sense. Other people need all the details to build the broad context. Different strokes for different folks.