Christian has a good amount of knowledge about computers. Last year, in seventh grade, he set up a computer that is currently in use at North Carolina State University for a research project in the Agricultural Engineering department. You can see the web page it serves here. The server features not only a web page, but also a blog, a Subversion Version Control System server, and ftp site, and a number of other things. He is currently working on improvements to the backup system and the addition of the Trac Software Project Management System. He will serve as our systems administrator for the duration for the project.
As we move into the new school year, I have decided it is time for him to take on a “real” programming project. Christian has worked to learn C# and C++ over the last couple of years by working through several books such as C++ Primer Plus, but has had now reasonable way to apply what he has learned. Now though, there are several programming tasks of about the right size with which he could be a real help. We have identified one project in particular that we will have him use as his first formal project. I have started using QT Creator, an open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment), so that is what we will set up for him to program. We will keep you posted on his progress.
I played with C++ many years ago, but when my 14,000 line program suddenly stopped working because I was missing a “}” somewhere (and it wouldn’t tell me where)… well, that’s about when I gave up and switched to Visual Basic for a while [smile].
Look forward to hearing about all the wonderful things Christian is able to do!
~Luke
That kind of thing can get pretty ugly, but fortunately they have tools for that now. And I honestly believe Visual BASIC is great. It works great and you can go really fast!
My 11 year old is very interested in learning how to make video games and if I am correct I think that he will have to start with learning C++. Is there anything out there that can help start him on his way?
Hello Connie. When Christian was about the same age as your 11 year old, we started him on C#. We got Visual Studio Express (a free download from Microsoft) and then had him work through a couple of C# tutorials. Beginning C# Game Programming is the one we started with, but there are several others. That helped him get his arms around object oriented programming without having to deal with pointers and garbage collection. After he got those concepts down, we moved on to C++ which is a lot closer to the hardware.
I hope that helps.