How To Get a Game-Obsessed Teenager Into Coding?

looseBits writes "I have a friend whose 14-year-old son spends all his time gaming, like any normal teenager. However, my friend would like to find a more productive interest for him and asked me how to get him into coding. When I started coding, it was on the Apple II, and one could quickly write code that was almost as interesting as commercially available software. Now, times have changed and it would probably take years of study if starting from scratch to write something anyone would find mildly interesting. Does anyone have experience in getting their children into programming? How did you keep them interested if the only thing they can do after a week is make the computer count to 10 and dump it on the screen?"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fask.slashdot.org%2Fstory %2F10%2F05%2F28%2F1854251%2FHow-To-Get-a-Game-Obsessed-Teenager-Into-Coding" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=How+To+Get+a+Game-Obsessed+Teenager+Into+Coding%3F%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fb it.ly%2Fa7PBHS" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/05/28/1854251/How-To-Get-a-Game-Obsessed-Teenager-Into-Coding?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/a1R9VBPU34RDNgpKcbCU2sYlR68/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/a1R9VBPU34RDNgpKcbCU2sYlR68/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/a1R9VBPU34RDNgpKcbCU2sYlR68/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/a1R9VBPU34RDNgpKcbCU2sYlR68/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/GqtM8yyG7jk" height="1" width="1"/

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