My 11 year old child wants to learn programming, where to start?

Minecraft modding seems like a great start, I have no idea what resource would be best.

May be something like this: https://www.learntomod.com/features.html

It might worth to look into robotics platforms such as: https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-Robot-Kit/s?k=Raspberry+...

I second neatze; I started around your son’s age by modding games (Morrowind). My younger brother got into Roblox, which is still popular.

My main driver was creating stories and cool new stuff for other people (Dad, brother, forum users) and getting feedback. Playing with your friends in a world you spent a month to build is an incredible experience.

When I was 11 years old I learnt to program starting with text based games in Turbo C++ or something.

Just setup a pc with constraints, pick a language, teach the syntax and let your kid make a game you can play with.

I would definitely recommend getting started in something like Scratch, covering the basics of if/else, for loops, arrays.

And then moving into Loved2D or Pico8, both lua based with tons of tutorials and other games you can play/edit.

Whatever you end up doing though thee most import things are... + Having a clear goal + Clear and immediate feedback + Balancing the difficulty with skill level, not difficult enough and we get bored, too difficult and we get stuck.

JavaScript is not often recommended as a first language but for kids the feedback loop of web development might keep them more interested!

Thinking back to myself when I was younger.. I think I would have valued being presented some options and being allowed to choose. So for example, explain Python and Java and why they are different. Let your child come up with a reason for choosing one. We might think Python is more fun but they might not.

I got into programming when I was 11 because I wanted to mod my favorite video game. Lucky for me there were multiple communities that helped me get started

Perhaps see if there are modding communities for his favorite video game(s)?

Check out https://github.com/HollyAdele/awesome-programming-for-kids

Grab an iPad and install Swift Playgrounds. Has you move a character to grab gems n stuff. Reminds me of my first programming language, Logo, though you are using Swift.

I would start the person off with easy level Leetcode questions, and some basic level Agile methodology for project planning (let him play around with Jira, see how he plans things, but start getting him used to tracking his hours and breaking down tasks (maybe start with having him enter and breakdown his daily homework into tasks via Jira or any other agile tool)).

Start getting him used to weekly code reviews/schoolwork reviews, and try to plan at least one day out of the week to get to know your son over lunch, this will help him develop the much needed social/culture fit cues. The social get together is different from the weekly 1:1, which is more about his perspective and goals. It’s never too early to start with this stuff.

If you know another parent that has a child with design and communication talent, set up some play dates so they can both collaborate on building what will hopefully one day be a great Calendar app that sends out notifications (in real time). Plus it’s a great opp to pickup that much needed well roundedness to engage with product development workflows.

This is all very important because aside from the tuition you will pay for college (if for some ungodly reason this child doesn’t pick comp sci), you will have to shell out a solid 17k for a bootcamp to save your child’s career 15 years from now. If you just start the kid early enough, you save 17k, or what will probably be 30k by then. Now that I think about it, have a bootcamp-emergency-fund that you contribute to starting right now might be good in case the kid goes through a phase and blows 4 years majoring in Media Studies.

The leetcode is the most important thing here, because even if you do all the right things I just mentioned above, no Leetcode skills means no job.

Remember, this kid has exactly 11 years to go from high school -> college -> straight to a 200k salary at a FAANG, he’s not gonna have a lot of time to have a naturally paced career where you work your way up to those places. So if you think I’m joking about any of this, I’m not. You’ve got 10 years to pull this off, best of luck.

P.S: Forget about the video game programming part though, that job doesn’t pay well.

Or you could steer him into a more sane career path, and nip all of this shit in the butt. Can’t go wrong with something in Medical.

https://scratch.mit.edu

I’d start with Spring Boot and maybe just a simple CRUD web service.

Scratch on Browser or even an iPad works well to start.

Give the kid a secondhand Thinkpad running OpenBSD, teach him basic shell, and tell him about the man command. He ought to be able to figure the rest out on his own.

Honestly, as someone who has grown up in the world of JS and interpreted languages, It's really important to teach them the fundamentals like filesystems, the command line, and especially harder, compiled languages, rather than JS or Python. I would recommend a good solid foundation like Java (especially if they like Minecraft).