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Teach him python (or ruby, or whatever else that is high-level and easy).

It's the same as basic was twenty years ago, just much more powerful, easyer to learn and more fun.

Write a game, perhaps based on a favourite book. Or something that involves a subject he's already interested. Doesn't matter if it's a simple text game. Let him write it on his own. Then when he's finished suggest a few improvements. Repeat. Once he's bored with that, start a new project.

That's how I learnt.

And for pity sake, do not ask him to kernel hack. It's way too abstract. You need something user-level with immediate and very visible results.

C++ primer plus by stephen prata.

http://www.amazon.com/Primer-Plus-5th-Stephen-Prata/dp/0672326973/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216718603&sr=8-1 [amazon.com]

It is one of the best ways to learn programming from absolutely knowing nothing! Because it explains in very accurate, precise and simple language that is very well expressed.
This is where I learned to program years ago, and I'd challenge anyone to find a better place to bring an absolute know nothing about programming into the fold.

It explains all the simple functions and whatnot for console programming, etc, if he can't dig that then he's not fit to program, the book makes C++ as easy as something as python, or the old visual basic.

The old visual basic 6 is not a BAD place to start if you can find some good programming books, because the old VB gave "immediate" results that kids often look for.

Being able to produce pretty pictures is always fun. I learnt programming by spending all my time drawing bouncing balls that changed colour in 320x200 VGA. Of course nowadays kids can use a lot more powerful graphics libraries like the aforementioned SDL, which can let them make a lot cooler stuff.

If he gets the hang of it, you could even teach him how to write a raytracer. That would also be good for his math, and be a nice project where more advanced programming techniques (e.g. data structures, recursion) and more advanced math (calculus, 3D geometry) have practical uses.

Give him nethack (or any other OSS game) to play. After a while when he will get interested - give him the source code for it.

Programming games is probably most engaging activity. I'm 31 now - but still on it ;)

The best language to teach him is $trendy_language_of_the_moment. If you don't teach him that then he'll never get anywhere. How can people hope to encourage people to learn when they're using $formerly_trendy_language? It's just so horrible that I'd rather gouge someone else's eyes out with a spoon that use it instead of $trendy_language_of_the_moment!

No, really. That way he can share his games or whatever with his classmates, simply by sending them a link.

Of course it'll be a longish road to get to that point, but it might be a goal he can relate to - and I know I simply wouldn't learn anything unless I could see the point. Still don't at 34, come to think of it :)

First off, I think you should start with a language such as Python or Ruby. I started with BASIC which was easy to grasp, and more modern languages are easy yet more powerful.

Second, when I started programming I was first looking at my brother, writing really simple BASIC programs on the C64. Later, I was interested in fractals and wrote algorithms for drawing fractals. I had a book with code examples for different fractals, but in some other language (I don't remember which). The process of interpreting the algorithm in the first language and translating it to BASIC was very good for learning. Tweaking and extending the algorithms and seeing the changes visually was very encouraging.

Today, if I were to teach a kid programming, I think I would look into Lego Mindstorms [lego.com]. It helps if the kid is into Lego or robotics, of course. That's a contained environment with a powerful and easy language, which is also part of something else, with immediate feedback on the changes. You can program it in either the Lego-supplied RCX Code (BASIC-like) or ROBOLAB (LabView-based), or any of a number of languages supplied by the community (C, C++, C#, Java, Lua etc).

That's THE way to get ANY teenager to do ANYTHING.

I don't see that not having a flashy GUI means anything. I grew up in a world where I saw flashy GUI's for exactly what they were. I was much happier hacking DOS to get that extra few KB of base memory than I was playing about in Windows 3.1.

The problem is that you can't foster curiosity, which is the main driver here. Nothing will make you sit down and learn a programming language more than curiosity for what you can make the computer do, whether you can do something better than Microsoft, etc. You can try very hard to keep interest, though, and there practical results tend to have greater effect - this is why most basic ICT in schools is based around roaming turtles, Lego RCX, "traffic-light" kits etc. Computer-controlled with visible, physical effect.

Personally, I think the best way to foster the right computer skills isn't to use a computer much at all (this is a philosophy I've held for most of my life - the best way to program is in your head, not a machine - the best way to write a story is on paper, not a word-processor, etc.). The best things to use to learn are simple gadgets. I'm not a gadget person. I'm not even very good at electronics but I struggle along and get a lot done.

Wire your house for a burglar alarm, controlled by a computer, and involve your children in every step. If your practical skills aren't up to scratch (good, you can "learn" by your mistakes together and your child can try to "out-think" you when you both hit the same problem), you can get X10/DMX-style equipment that makes it a cinch. But there's nothing like a bug that'll scare the crap out of you when the alarm goes off because you didn't cater for a niche-case (opening the back-door while the power was out etc.). It only needs an ancient "sacrifical" computer that doesn't matter if you blow its parallel port, and it introduces every single reason behind having computers - automate tasks that a human could do using simple, cheap components.

You can learn programming, you can learn embedded programming, you learn about the importance of bug-checking and clean code, you learn about interfacing, buses, serial/parallel data transfer, physical and real-world effects and how to counter them in software (e.g. switch debouncing). You even get to learn how the damn computer does its job so that it's no longer a magic box that does stuff. You get to interface with all types of cool gear. You get to bring practical, real-life skills into the learning environment which can help immensely if your child learns better that way. (And I don't count "how to write a letter in Office", I mean REAL life skills, like practical problems, electricity and electronics, wiring, why the bloody ladder won't stay still and why Daddy put his foot through the roof).

The rewards are instant, visible, practical, extendible and "show-off-able". The "reward" of having the whole family laugh at a a doorbell that plays a WAV when someone presses it is very rewarding especially when "it was all my son's work". My particular favourite is a doorbell that goes "knock knock" when you ring it. I also bought an old-fashioned door knocker which has an integrated switch in it and want it to set off a "ding-dong" sound, just to see the postman's face. I'm doing it with simple electronics and one of those recorable greetings-card chips but you can do it with a PC easily. Ten minutes of very basic wiring to an old-fashioned joystick port (ancient laptops are great for this sort of thing), a WAV file off a free website and a twenty line program. You can see exactly where his skills lie. Is he a better programmer? Is he a better thinker? Is he better at practicalities? But no matter what he is, it's so simple to do that you can have great fun wiring it up (probably with Mum in the background tapping her feet because she's getting sick of "Yankee Doodle" every time the neighbour's call).

Then you need to get to the point, as quickly as possible, where he can *think* of new stuff to do himself. You started with a doorbell

I started programming when I was about 12, and I am completely self taught. My parents knew nothing about computers, and still know nothing now despite my efforts. Anyway, i started with javascript, html, and php. (This was around 6 years ago). I think it was much easier to start learning the basics of this kinda stuff when you don't have to deal with all the boring (to a 12yo) details of memory management, libraries, and compilers etc. Web programming is something were you can get the instant results and action, you can just keep tweaking the source file and hitting F5 until you get something that works and looks vaguely like what you're after; this is especially useful when you don't know what you're doing. :)

I had a few books which taught me the basics, a javascript book and a html book. They only covered simple things, (I think the js book was a For Dummies..., actually), but it was enough to get me started. After that I found the php.net docs and a friend showed me loads of his php code and i picked that up fairly quickly.

Being a website, it's something easy to show off too, it was kinda cool to be like "dude, the whole world can see my webpage!". Following that theme, i got started on irc bots, eggdrops are written in C, and you can script em with tcl. Be careful tho, tcl is kinda quirky and weird (at least, that's how i remember it). But it's great for simple stuff, get the bot to parse some text and reply etc. This might also be a good time to learn some networking stuff. Also since eggdrops can also have C modules written, this is a possible path into C, although I didn't go that way so I don't know how good it is.

I eventually learned C(++) from some online tutorial, http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/ [cplusplus.com] I think. And I wrote a load of code for manipulating some large binary files (game resource files, from Halo). I certainly don't recommend letting anyone learn C solely from some tutorial, since I had rather large gaps in my knowledge at this point (that code i wrote is terrible), but it was some great experience anyway. I played around with some .NET (ugh!) gui stuff, because I didn't know how else to make a gui program at the time (seriously, I don't know how I was meant to know about qt, gtk, or win32 etc at this point) and a program that just prints text on the command line got boring real fast.

Hacking at computer games was what really drove my interest in C at that time. Reverse engineering of the file formats was fun! Even if I did kinda suck at it and just found most of the info on the web.

Looking back, I'm thinking I probably would have liked someone to show me python (and maybe perl) much earlier than when i eventually discovered them. php sucks as a general purpose scripting language and C gets tedious for those little tasks.

Sorry that was all probably a little incoherent, I spent the time I was meant to be doing english homework programming ;)

...you're his dad. The time you spend with him will be one of the highlights of his life, and will determine how he, in turn, raises his kids. Whether you suck as a teacher or not isn't even on the scale. Try to learn. Do the best you can and encourage him to let his interests take him to other sources. ALWAYS answer his questions.

Sorry for the polemic, but believe me, your son will stretch himself to understand you far more than he will even for the most gifted teacher. What I owe to my parents can never be repaid, and there isn't a day goes by that I don't miss them.