As you said quick rewards within 2-3 days, what about writing mods for Luanti? https://luanti.org/

I am personally a Luanti addict(both game development and game playing!)

As a person who started with high-level languages, I will say that they severely hinder one’s understanding of how systems really work. I recommend having him start out with the C programming language or a similar low-level language.

Some exercises that you could have him do include:

• Programming a ranked-choice-voting algorithm
• Writing a program that takes a PPM image (I have never seen an easier image file format to work with) and performs a box blur with the surrounding pixels, spitting out the new image to a file
• Writing a text adventure in the terminal. Don’t force him to use regex, though. Just have it have numbered options.

On programming games:

If you want him to program a game for himself, I would recommend SDL (SDL2 or SDL3) if he’s doing it in C. It may be in his interests to program the game in another language than C, though, since C can be difficult to program games in, for beginners.

Some good ideas for a game to start out with are Yahtzee (like the KDE program Kiriki), Minesweeper, Pong, or Breakout. If he’s doing it with a game engine, I recommend having him start out with Godot. It’s FLOSS, and GDScript is easy to learn.

Nice getup to get the basic mindset of programming for kids from the folks at MIT: https://scratch.mit.edu/

Somewhere around there’s a locally installable version, I’d first found it via the little yunohost boxes.

Godot has a series of tutorials focused at kids looking to make their first game. should check that out. Godot is really easy to use.

Or you could go the route that many of us did way back in the day with geocities and set up a neocities account and learn the basics of HTML. they can set up their own little website for whatever their passion is. HTML, IMHO, is a great introduction to coding.

You try to have him hack php websites. That seems to be very easy these days.

Edit: others suggested programming games; those are also a great start that satisfies the two big requirements I mention.

If he plays any single player games, i’d probably start there. Modding. Especially if Minecraft or Roblox or Rimworld and the like.

I’ve taught a lot of people low level C and C++ over the years. Two of the most important things for beginners is getting feedback (what I call “blinky lights”) and a reason to persist when learning gets hard. Creating a mod or cheats for a game can be great at fulfilling both of those requirements. You get to see a more tangible result of your work than a CLI print, and you have goals or a vision you’re chasing. This is one reason why webdev is so accessible; the issue there is learning multiple languages and frameworks all at the same time which can be difficult if unguided.

My circles tend to all be low-level systems people, may be different in others; but all of the best programmers I know started with hacking on or making games or things for games. The desire to understand, to know more, to create; that pushed all of them. Getting to see the beating heart —the code describing the game mechanics you’ve used for hours— for the first time, can be a magical experience; so things with open APIs or unity games where the code is relatively accessible, are quite good.

Depends on what he likes to play, but PICO-8 can be easy and fun for simple 2D stuff.

It’s been a couple of years since I used it, but I recall making a platformer without too much trouble (tho, I was loosely following a tutorial)

Another interesting place to start could be excel formulas. If he’s into any tabletop rpgs challenge him to make a character sheet using formulas and named cells. This could be a good baby step into the fundamentals of programming learning if functions and how two objects interact in code. Once he has that, add an initiative tracker using VBA.

Honestly, I hate JavaScript, but I like JavaScript for this. You don’t need a compiler and every computer has an interpreter for it. You could make a baseline thing and let him tinker. It comes with excellent developer tools with breakpoints, stepping, live editing. It’s literally the least you have to do to make working interactive code.

Or another option is there was Robocode — a tank game where you program an autonomous robot to win a battle royale. Or there is Screeps — a StarCraft like game where you write code for different buildings and units and attempt to conquer the land.

I like the idea of code-as-gameplay. You get to play while being pushed to write more sophisticated code in order to do better.

Something like a raspberry pi with an activity book might be the thing, games are pretty advanced if you don’t know the basics of data handling and such.

!learn_programming@programming.dev might help you too.

Honestly, I started with a specific goal that I somehow lucked out into it being a relatively simple script with iMacros of all things, and that was my introduction to the whole if/then control flow loop basics. (Yes, it recorded my stuff, but I had to go in and alter it and mess around a lot.) And I messed around with Scratch at the same time too. I really think this helped my actual Baby’s First Program go down more easily in my first computer science class in college. (First language due to college was Racket, second was Java, third was C, I think this is fine.)

Making very simple video game mods might help too, with modding communities that have loads of documentation and “where do I start?” resources.

If you have a spare iPad the Swift Playgrounds app is free and fun.