Everyone else’s suggestions are great.

Get them a copy of Factorio, it’s a game, but it’s all about computer science fundamentals, architecture, pipelining, busing, data integrity, etc. It’s a visual game, but it’ll scratch the itch of programming. It’ll get them to think.

Buy the hardware projects, the little ones with either a pic, an Arduino, something that does something physical. A little bit of programming. To make a thing happen. So they can experiment.

Look at the software robot competitions, there’s a couple on steam, there’s couple elsewhere, you can do it as a family project, whiteboard out the logic of what your robot will do, and you can write it together. And see how it acts.

Just make sure anything you get, has a very small feedback loop, so they can iterate very quickly. That’ll keep them engaged and exploring. You don’t want to get a daunting project that’s going to take weeks to see any output. You want things on the order of minutes, or even seconds to see what happens

See if you can find a book on python, and work through it a bit. Sit down with him once you know some and try making something basic with turtle or the likes. Your goal is to keep his interest up and not make it a “studying” thing. For a kid the most important part is that he needs to be able to see results of what he’s making. Drawing simple shapes, cool patterns, etc. in python is a nice way to start and it can teach all the basic initial things he needs to know.

There’s also simple robot kits for kids that could be fun to play with, which he could eventually move on to basic electronics to after from.

W.r.t. safe browsing, I’d try blocking egregiously bad stuff with some DNS blocker that you either buy or host using something like pihole. Use it to block ads and well known “bad” domain names. Also have a conversation about it. (I’m not sure how much this helps here considering he’s 8… but better then nothing.)

I found khan academy to be really good. My daughter handled the JavaScript module pretty well at the age of 9. If your son is already familiar with the concept of programming and can read well enough, I’d be pretty sure he’d enjoy this

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming

Well, Scratch is certainly a good starting point so I would assume he wants more if he’s been all over it.

There are some toys and kits available but I am not really aware if they are any good.

If my little brother would make such a request I probably would want to go with Python and an Arduino project. Robots are cool so it would pique his curiosity while basics with Arduino should be challenging but manageable. The only drawback is that it probably would require some time investment on your side.

A cheaper alternative would be directing him towards writing some simple programs in Python or Java as the only setup this would require is an IDE and it would also teach him googling for information.

I think the safety online is the biggest problem here and the only thing I can think of is to only allow some domains…

Maybe some of these suggestions sound good to you, if so I’ll gladly expand on them.

Also big kudos to your approach on the matter.

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I’m going to go a slightly different direction and suggest something that has physical feedback like Adafruit’s CircuitPlayground. It can be setup to use MakeCode, CircuitPython, or Arduino and there’s a lot of good resources, both for purchase, and free: https://www.adafruit.com/category/965

In terms of keeping him safe online look into some content filtering for the whole home network, either paid or self-hosted.

Projects that act upon physical stuff are the most rewarding. Something simple such as building a simple Python script that interacts with a smart home API and turns switches on/off or changes light colors around the house are relatively simple and require no hardware/mechanics if you’re not into robotics, soldering or circuit boards.

You’ve got a great kid :)

Make Code Arcade is a great next step if your child has completed the Scratch tutorials.

MakeCode allows building with BlockCode, but also supports toggling to Python or JavaScript.

Scratch and Make Code Arcade are both free.

For the Christmas present, get them a [MeowBithttps://www.microcenter.com/product/668481/kittenbot-meowbit-card-sized-retro-game-computer-codable-console) - a $50.00 hand held game system that plays the games they write using MakeCode Arcade.

I don’t want to undermine everyone’s suggestions but I think they are failing to understand this is a kid, buying him a laptop and stuff is okay but doesn’t motivate him to much.

Check for authors of books for kids. Invent with python is great, that was going to be my suggestion. But same author has plenty, like this one https://turtleappstore.com/book/ … to echo someone who mentioned Minecraft (indeed, already marked a whole generation into computer science subject!). Good luck! Maybe you can even find something for you, like, how do we teach CS/ programming to kids? How come that moving the Logo turtle was alright for so many years, lol

One suggestion I haven’t seen, get him a super-cheap laptop with Linux. The exposure to a new environment beyond his phone (and likely Chromebook) will help him get more comfortable with things outside the norm.

It will help him discover if he likes to “make things” or “figure things out” which are very different activities that both directly corrolate with programming.

I learned programming at about 12, by following tutorials for the Pygame python library. It doesn’t do anything especially fancy, but it taught me many concepts, while I had a lot of fun. My first project was making the traditional snake game, which I think is a good level of complexity.

This was a while back, but my cousin learned to program using Codecademy. These were self-paced courses using web interfaces, which was nice because they didn’t have to install anything, they just used a web browser.

It looks like codecademy has a game development path: https://www.codecademy.com/catalog/subject/game-development

Their python chatbot course looks fun too: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/paths/build-chatbots-with-python

You can’t do wrong with: https://nostarch.com/catalog/kids based on your kid’s interests and experience I would probably point towards any of the python proposals, but I encourage you to look through the catalog together and find one that sounds interesting.

Do you have a linux machine at home? My 12 year old daughter is also wanting to learn to program and I’ve been updating the NakedMUD codebase to work with Python 3. It has been working for a while now but I’m still tweaking some stuff within the codebase before turning her loose on it. When it’s ready I’ll probably throw the modified code up on a server somewhere.

If you’re not familiar with MUDs they’re online text-based game servers (Everquest was basically a graphical version of one, supposedly even using code stolen from the most popular at the time). NakedMUD has a core written in C but the game engine itself is extensible with Python (and Python changes can be initialized without rebooting the server) and the world/NPC handling code is also extensible with Python. Users can dabble around with making changes to the Python scripts and then see the results real time, and in a gaming environment. To me it seemed like the ideal way for my daughter to learn programming in a way that will likely keep her interest.

I often suggest MIT App Inventor. Most kids are more comfortable with phone apps.

But this requires an android phone.