[totierne2]

I am looking for a bottle of computer science motivation for my 16 year old. I do an hour a week coding with him. It is not enough, he does no coding in between times. There are other things he prioritises ahead of coding. (School, music, YouTube videos, and chess.)

[mywacaday]

Pushing him to do something weekly that he doesn't sound interested in at the moment will only push him away from it in the longer term. Maybe try programming something that overlaps with his other interests that deepens his understanding of both subjects.

[LocalH]

Then stop focusing on trying to get him to code, and focus on his music, his chess, his YouTube videos (especially if he has aspiration to be a content creator rather than a passive consumer), and his academics. Maybe related to one of those things, you could gently try to build a bridge between them and coding. However, don't force it. If you force it, you're essentially going to be raising someone who hates programming because "it's that shit my mom/dad forced me to do when I had no interest in doing it, I really wanted to be developing my chess game instead".

[voz_]

This is good advice if you live in a Hollywood movie fantasy, or are insanely rich. Otherwise this is bad advice.

A parents job is to steer their kids not into superficial happiness found through whatever interested them at 16, but to actual long term happiness achieved through fulfillment, accomplishment, stability, and belonging.

If I ignored CS pushed by my father to focus on whatever interested me at 16 (pot, girls, metal music, wow), I’m not sure where id be, but I imagine it would be worse off.

[Swizec]

Maybe your son is not into coding and that’s okay. This is not a great profession to be in if you don’t enjoy it.

[gigatexal]

Let him find his passion. Don’t force him into programming. There’s plenty in the tech space that needs doing. And there’s even more in life that he can do to earn a living that’s not tech related.

[hooverd]

Imagine doing science, engineering, or mathematics. Might as well be getting an English degree.

[dybber]

1) Make him come up with the projects to do. Use brainstorming techniques. Only help by guiding, not by telling him to do specific things

2) Build your similar own projects as well

3) Try with electronics. For that age group I have had good succes with MicroPython on ESP32’s + various sensors/actuators. The first thing I do is connect an LED strip with RGB LED’s and let them play with that.

4) Find him peers with the same interest. In that age peers are better partners. You can still help facilitate a bit, but the best would be to find a Coding club.

[lostmsu]

> Make him come up with the projects to do. Use brainstorming techniques. Only help by guiding, not by telling him to do specific things

I found it difficult to do with a person who did not get how to use control flow and can not mentally combine multiple control flow constructs.

[tsingy]

Try finding something that he likes, that could be enhanced with programming to start with. Mine was fantasy basketball, doing it with the help of computers is so much better than by hand.

[Cerium]

And keep it approachable! There is nothing wrong with writing that fantasy basketball calculator as a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets have many advantages that get overlooked by pushing for a "real language" while jump into a programming language involves learning a lot of new concepts at once.

For example, spreadsheets make all the memory visible at once. It makes sense like a piece of paper. You also have intuitive understanding of your algorithms memory consumption. Computing something for N by N obviously uses N^2 cells. Many problems will be solved in 2^n which will mean dragging down that cell for a short while at low values and suddenly a very long while.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Appeal to his music interests. This book looks pretty good and uses free tools:

https://www.routledge.com/Introduction-to-Digital-Music-with...

[qup]

Chess-related chatbot? Something his friends/chat room/twitch can interact with, that has some kind of chess functionality.

Look up "aol chat coms" for inspiration from the 90s.

There used to be bots that played a scrambler game in AOL chat, you could make a chess-related one.

[throwawaaarrgh]

Leave him alone? School, music, and chess are more than enough for him to invest himself in without you pushing your failed hopes and dreams on a little clone. YouTube videos are also fine, we all like entertainment.

[password4321]

Lots of ideas two days ago:

Two years of teaching high school CS

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36355172

[gareve]

create a music or YouTube bot together