My step-son, who is 18, is doing a make-up year (Geometry in the Fall, followed by Algebra and Pre-Cal in the Winter) after finishing high school with generally great marks, with hopes of getting accepted into Computer Science or Computer Engineering next year. The makeup courses will be one evening a week. So, what to do with the rest of the time?

I have plans for that: I hope to get him involved in becoming a software developer, so that by the time school starts in a year's time, he'll have some valuable experience under his belt. He has some experience in C++ from high school, so can probably work his way through some C programming. He is on a Mac, using OS X (some fairly recent version), so I would like to set him up with a development environment that will work for a variety of languages.

You may be wondering, Gee, are you sure he might not be interested in some other subject than the one you've been fascinated in for the last thirty years? and frankly I don't know. However, the way he thinks suggests writing code might be exactly what he'd be great at.

Your followup question might be So how come he did badly at the Math courses the first time around? and my response is, he hadn't developed enough problem-solving skills yet. He'd run up against a tough example, try one or two ways to solve the problem, then give up. I'm going to try to stay on top of his progress this time, and make sure that he understands each week's work.

And if he still does poorly on those Math courses, then we'll change course and put him into Political Science or Journalism or something.

Your feedback please.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

In reply to How do I get my teenager interested in software development? by talexb

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