How old do you need to be to take part in these camps?

These ones are aimed at adults.

Thx. My kid wants to get involved in learning coding

Send him to military school ssorenn

I am very seriously considering this, but haven't pulled the trigger.

@jy. My boy is awesome and at 11 he has interest. I want to help in anyway I can

ss

There are many awesome ways for kids to get into programming, but these aren't really aimed at that.

Personally, I'd recommend getting a LEGO Mindstorm set.

: )

What are your thoughts, if you don't mind sharing?

There are coding camps run out of Northwestern U and University of Chicago run by ID tech. He took one at 10 and loved it. They used the mine craft platform. I'm trying to be a little proactive and learn from people who know , on how to direct him going forward

@ss: Find something he wants to build (anything, it doesn't matter), and then work out what tools he need to be able to build it.

Most programmers will recommend you their favourite tools (and I'm having to actively try not to do that here), but the truth is it doesn't matter what tools he uses - it matters that he's interested enough and motivated to build whatever he's working on.

I am so not the tool guy. We built a lot of K'nect X roller coasters. But busting out the tool belt is not my thing.

StarLogo is also worth checking out. A fun language/interface developed by MIT to teach children to coding and modeling. It has a lot of good tutorials so you don't really need to know anything before hand to do cool stuff.

http://education.mit.edu/portfolio_page/starlogo-tng/

I'm pretty sure ATC meant *programming tools*. As in, don't just decide to randomly learn Ruby. Pick a project that sounds fun and then find out the best language to complete that project.

Sorry, I meant software tools. So your question becomes "my son wants to build an RTS game he can play with his friends - where should I tell him to start?" or "my son wants to build a minecraft addon" or, whatever.

Or just save yourself a bunch of time and pick up a Mindstorm kit and you both can have tons of fun : )

Lol. Oops. That's funny. I really appreciate it guys.

Following up on the article that abge shared.
IMO there are some great boot camps out there, where in you can get training for a specific niche of Computer Science and transition in that job sector.
One good example is Insight Data Science/Engineering program :
http://insightdatascience.com/
http://insightdataengineering.com/

However, there are certain cons to this: Persons who have got training from such camps can not replace a full fledged computer scientist in specific positions like Software development. Because there is no way a person can be taught the essentials of Data structures, Algorithms, good/optimized coding practices, operating systems in a few weeks.
So, these camps should be limited to only things like web/app development which can be learned easily and in which the risk factor (if the system goes haywire) is minimal.

pfft Lego. One word for you: Arduino

Yeah, arduino is great but probably not the best choice for a ten year old and a father with limited (no?) Coding experience. If you bite off more than you can chew, you'll just get discouraged. Start with something easy and fun. It's pretty easy to move to arduino whenever you want

Sounds like he needs to get a better father. One with some coding chops and much better at diplomacy too.

Any replacement fathers out there?

(-1) ^^^

Maybe get him introduced to webdesign :-)

I would agree that he should learn through projects though. That's how I prefer to learn almost everything though.

Does he want a website? Computer game? Figure out his own secret encryption methods? I guess you don't want him to learn how to hack, but in theory you could let him hack his own stuff for instance, to deepen his understanding and so he sees what makes hacking harder, so he learns how the whole cat&mouse game between hackers and developers works..
Does he want to chat with his own program? Modify the games he plays?

If you're wealthy enough, does he want to program his own robot? I haven't done lots of research, but I think you can almost compare the price of robots to that of PCs, although I might be dead wrong there.

Lots of options. What does he like and how far do you want to take him?
Does failure stimulate or demotivate him? Because some things will require lots of trial and lots of error before he starts to grasp the basics and can start working on something while other things may bore him because there's nothing left to learn after a few weeks.

I also don't know how hard most of the things I mentioned are, FYI :-)
I don't know how to do most things, but then I never tried them and motivated 11-year-olds learn really fast.

See what's reasonable in terms of price and difficulty and let him know, then he knows daddy gave it thought and he will have various options already laid out for him.