simpledave

Try out Scratch! It's a programming langauge explicitly for kids. Don't enroll her in community college courses or have her try online resources like codecademy if you want to keep her interested. Go to scratch.MIT.edu and let her have fun making games until she's developed enough knowledge and interest to progress onto something else.

Kids have short attention spans, and throwing her into something like a Java or Objective C course is going to make a kid lose interest very fast. Something like codecademy is going to drag along at a very slow pace, more or less having her copy what's on the screen with no room for experimentation or deviation, and it'll take her hours upon hours before she's able to make something interesting, by which time most young kids will have given up. On the other hand, sitting through something like MIT's free lectures on YouTube is going to confuse her. They're tailored for people who are taking math on the side, from calculus to linear math.

Scratch is designed for kids. It teaches them the essential tools they need to make something quickly, and it keeps it fun. As they progress with scratch, they can begin to make some very complex games, and they can do it much faster and with much more ease than they can with something like C++.

If I were teaching a kid how to program, I wouldn't want to teach them about manual memory management and bitwise operations right away. I would introduce them to something that shows them just how powerful a programming language can be, while keeping it at a high enough level that they don't need to worry about memory, overhead, or anything. Scratch does that. It will help a kid build enough interest in programming so that when they're ready to progress to a more complex language, they won't be intimidated, discouraged, or lose interest.

Is that all EVA foam, or are some parts pep/fiberglass/bondo?

Great work, btw. As a 405th/RPF lurker, I am very impressed.

If this is a difficult question to answer, I'm really sorry. I don't want to come off the wrong way in asking it.

When he was in the womb, were you aware that he wasn't developing "properly?" And if so, did your doctors give you a choice to continue the pregnancy or terminate it?

I'm sitting here wondering what I and my girlfriend would do, and I can't help but feel like a selfish asshole because I don't think I would be on the side of having the kid. I want to say that it's because I would want to spare the kid any pain, but I think it's more because the thought of it scares me and I think it would hurt me more (emotionally, at least). I want you to know that I think you're a terrific person for taking good care of your son. You're a one-in-a-million mom, because I think there are a lot more people who be too afraid to be a loving parent (like myself) than there are brave people like you.

Thanks for being a better person than the rest of us.