Can you recommend some way to get a child started in coding? I have a twelve year old who I think would be good at it.
Try Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/)
5 Tools to Introduce Programming to Kids
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/05/5-tools-to-introduce-programming-to-kids/
are there any family members that have developed software? it can be very helpful to talk about it with others
software development is a series of incremental successes built on prior successes. i call them little victories. little functions providing a capability that when combined with others produce something interesting.
goals help. projects and challenges are useful. being able to conceive of the idea properly is usually the major hurdle. few people can develop successful systems off the cuff without a full(ish) design.
one thing i’ve noticed is unlimited game play can eat into development time, which could keep a promising developer from developing their skills.
that being said, for a kid, game development can be exciting enough to keep them focused on the task over time.
as another milestone, if they’ve shown interest and have developed for a while, consider a weekend project to buy the parts for a new computer. then spend the weekend together assembling it and then figuring out how to get the software installed and the system functioning as they’d like. it’s a very good parent-kid project and allows the kid to feel a sense of real world accomplishment once completed.
btw, some of today’s kid friendly tech would be:
1. html/javascript (web pages, fairly simple)
2. c/c++ (core application dev language)
3. java (cross platform dev language)
4. windows (main operating system to learn/understand)
5. linux (primary operating system for most embedded systems)
6. raspberry pi and arduino (very cheap single board computers)
7. ogre (one of the many game dev toolkits)
one of my first projects was a lunar lander program. fairly simplistic game of weaving back and forth to avoid ‘canyon walls’ during a landing. after that, i developed other basic dungeon crawlers like rogue. these systems provide an interesting end goal while yielding some useful technical hurdles. basic graphics, disk i/o, user i/o, timing, database, and AI are just some of the things the dev would touch on while developing such a game.
i hope that helps. drop me a note if you’d like more.