To retain the 14 years old boy's attention more than 10 minutes on something that not flashy was a real challenge :-)

I think you can take a look at Macromedia Flash version 5 or 6. The action-script programming language was not the best, but it's object oriented and the feedback was great. With a couple of lines of code and a bit of imagimation he can build a great looking game or animation that he can put on a site to share with friends. Book's on this subject are easy to find and there is many ressources site on the net too.



>Hi
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>My son is 14, active across a wide range of stuff, achiever, types fast. He wants to learn to program, partly to empower him in some other domain he may enter later e.g. biosciences. For now he does maintain a personal website, like some of his friends do, which does goofy stuff in VBscript and Javascript. Now although old dad here knows VFP I don't feel I should necessarily teach him VFP as his first programming language. My whole computing-belief-system might be decrepit and dusty to him! Plus imagine if he had to comment on my code...
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>Best coding and data-analysis skills seem to arise in carefully thinking techniques out, reading, reflecting, without pressure, rather than copying or just imitating, so I favour a long gently supervised course of learning at variable teenager speeds over learning it all age 19.
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>He is a regular peer-driven kid. I think he'd specially enjoy being able to distribute .exes, which isn't always possible on day 1. VB has become a bit of a dead-end. In terms of ultimate utility for when he is older, we were thinking about C#... but perhaps a programmable gaming environment would be more fun... Anyway, of course, I want his efforts to bear fruit for him.
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>Comments, resources - other parents, anyone?
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>Thanks!
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>Dick