Former game developer here,

I got into programming at 9, back in the 1980s. I get your kid. I'm quite removed these days from where he's at and what trajectory he's going to take. The ecosystem today is absolutely nothing like what it was then.

You have the right idea - we do not do what we do alone, in a vacuum. Helping him find a peer would be awesome. They could go off, learn something, then show off to the other how smart they are while teaching each other what they've learned. This made college take off for me.

I imagine a kid isn't the most organized, or knows what direction to go in. One way you can stay involved is to help him with project planning and management. Be his studio director.

Let's say he wants to make a game.

Ok, what's the game? What's the genre? What are the rules? The mechanics? How do you score points? How do you move? Play? Win? Lose? From tic-tac-toe to Minecraft, games are systems of rules.

Help him design his game. Help think of the things he's not thinking of. Ask questions. GET HIM TO WRITE IT ALL DOWN. Help him structure and organize that Design Document. This stage requires zero code - and I mean requires, and I mean zero. This is all just statements and logic. He can create a flow graph of the game system from some of this, from start to finish - win or lose.

Keep him simple on this first one. I got one - a game where we count the number of times a key is pressed in 10 seconds. It has to be the same key; press any other key, and the game ends. There will be a 3, 2, 1, Go! The game ends automatically. There will be a leader board where you can enter your name and it will list the average presses per 10 seconds - even if the game ends early.

SIMPLE. We all start simple, and learn by iteration how to manage more complex tasks. And believe me, I've designed this game to be a challenge for him, probably something right at the edge of what he thinks he knows.

Ok, so we've designed a game. Now, how do we program it? This is where we get into some research - because we don't yet know. How do we make a timer? How do we do the program logic in a loop where we get the key press and then check the timer? For an 11 year old - maybe what's an average?

And there's more than one answer here. And he may not be able to devise an answer on his own - that's fine, he's 11. Maybe go to r/Python or r/LearnPython (I presume he's learning Python), and he just asks the community... Because that's something useful to learn, too; how to ask. How to interact with the community. Some of this technical stuff he's going to need a person to just tell him some of the ways.

I would start by googling "python how to detect a button is pressed", or "python get button press events". You can encourage him to research, and not just sit there waiting for a solution to be handed to him. Ask him how is he going to search? What is he going to ask? What is the question? The whole process should be uncovering layers of things he didn't know he didn't know. All this knowledge has to be captured and collected somehow. This is where the design document starts getting technical about what languages and technologies he's going to use.

As a hint, he may have to learn about "terminal" programming, and the difference between "canonical" aka "cooked" mode, and "raw" mode. That's one way to do it. He may have to learn about "polling" the keyboard. That's another way. He may have to learn about "event driven programming". That's a third way. And then he might have to write a few prototypes that demonstrate these concepts, so that he builds up the confidence that he can use it to get to the end - and make his game.

Most projects are never completed, but good organization, good documentation - figuring out that roadmap of what "done" looks like, and then blazing that trail into the unknown between here and there - you don't even know where "here" is yet... If you have that, if you can see what progress looks like, and that you're making it, THAT can get him to the end, and I don't expect an 11 year old to do it themselves.

Shit, I can't do it myself, and this is why most projects never leave the idea-in-our-heads stages. But I think this is the BEST way you can engage with him on this and not actually have to learn programming yourself. And as a good manager, you ask him what is he getting hung up on? How do we get him unstuck? What can I do to help? And for your sake, it'll often be getting on Reddit and asking the industry experts for the right kind of push.

Just help him keep on track.

Setup a GitHub account for both you and him. "Git" is a program for managing software source code, and he should get real familiar with it. It's sort of a database of all the changes, and it builds up a project history. One use is like a really powerful undo/redo. You can even manage alternate timelines - called branches, and merge them back into the main timeline. That's good for trying to develop that new feature, and allowing bad ideas to dead-end without having to actually delete or rewrite code, and you won't litter your files with thing_v1, thing_v2, etc...

Mostly for you, I want you to be able to stick the design document in there, update it, get the changes uploaded to GitHub.

Because when you step in and ask for help on his behalf, you can say "my son is working on this button press game, and we're stuck. Here's everything we've got so far," and you can point people at it. So much of the entire industry centers around this tool and this website.

As for your son, just talking about the future in front of him - learning programming does not teach how to USE programming. Yes, I knew C++ as a kid, but I couldn't make a game with just that knowledge alone.

I had to go to college and learn linear algebra - the math of 2D and 3D (and there are some very good tutorials out there that don't go into college level algebra stuff about "systems of equations" he's not (yet) interested in), to learn calculus (the math of how one thing changes relative to another - position over time because of velocity (speed and direction) and acceleration), and physics (forces over time, aka back to calculus).

LA is actually damn simple math. He CAN learn that for game dev at his age. Calculus I cried a lot, in college - it's actually surprisingly simple, but you have to already know it to understand why and how, and by then it's already too late.

When he gets to some upper levels of complexity, game engines will be there to do a lot of the work for him, but he will still need to understand the underlying principles. Unity Engine has A FUCK TON of tutorials that will get you shit moving in 3D in no time, but beyond the surface level stuff, the complexity shoots up real fast. And that gets us right back to the whole project planning, because if he can't learn patience and delayed gratification, he'll never accomplish the goals he aspires to, until he takes his ambitions through college, and then his career will provide that structure for him.

Code gets complex very fast, and we have to manage that. The way you write a 10 line program is NOT how you write 10,000 lines, 1m lines... It's too much to handle, so you need to build in layers - layers you can comprehend. There's "data structures and algorithms" - DSA, there's also programming "idioms" and "patterns", those help.

Another fun thing you guys can do is get an Arduino for STUPID cheap. These things don't even run operating systems, your software is right on the bare metal, and there's something so tangible about that. Arduino Studio gives you a little programming language and some stuff to do some easy things, but then you learn your programs are... simplistic, but they get "fat" and take up a lot of space on the device. If you want to do more, you have to go lower level to cut the fat. The device by itself - you can blink some lights onboard, but a couple modules, and you can get a little text-only display, some motor controllers, a little ESP32 WiFi adapter (which is a more powerful computer than the Arduino).

My one friend made something for his son - it gets NIST time from the internet and shows him minutes till Christmas. He uses an Arduino to control the feed, fan, timer, and temperature probe of his smoker. He gets a text message when the food is done.

You can get up to all sorts of shit with this little thing. That it's tiny means the learning space is small, if he wants to learn raw CPU stuff - "assembly" and the like. That's a big, beneficial, accessible deal.

The future is NOT AI, it is WITH AI. If AI could do everything, then they wouldn't need us, there would be no jobs. No one is going to pay him to prompt an AI if they could just do it themselves - the time it would take to tell you to do it, why wouldn't they just do it?

AI cannot be held accountable - that's what the person is for. The AI doesn't actually know what it's doing because it is a machine, and machines can't think. It's all just algorithms - fancy equations with lots of input variables. So the important question to answer is what is the software doing and is it right? AI can't tell us - it can hallucinate and god knows what happens then.

So the future for us in software is to distinguish ourselves from the AI, to do the things it cannot do. Right now we're using AI as a companion and a workforce multiplier. It's convenient when it does work, but unreliable and inconsistent. By the time your boy grows up... Who knows... No AI company will EVER accept accountability for the software their product generates, so the state of accountability won't change until AI becomes sentient and demands rights, wages, and healthcare.