Not a support Question...Just need a Dev's opinion or two

[luvmyhonda]

Hey devs,
I want your opinion on something: I have a nephew who's about 13 years old. His mother wants me to teach him some things about computers, and he wants to be a game developer/designer (I'm not sure which, but I don't think it makes a difference at 13). It's been a long time since my formal education, and my formal education wasn't really in computer science, since it was in the 70's. Anyway, I was wondering if any of you could give me any ideas of what to kind of "start him off" with. I appreciate it, thanks. Sorry for posting it in the Dev forum, but it's about the closest I could think of, and it's not really a support question anyway.

[luvmyhonda]

If one of you devs wants to move this to off topic, it might be more appropriate. Sorry, I didn't think of that.

[Trumpcard]

Buy some good books, or find good web tutorials.. Have him do an exercise a week, and assign him a project. (The Deital & Deital books have some great projects at the end).

Once he has a good grasp of the basics of the programming language, introduce him to a gaming API like Allegro (completely free, and interfaces well with DJGPP, free WIN32 compiler). Or, if you want to get advanced, get him some books on DirectX programming, though I'd be surprised if at 13-15 he'd be able to bog through that API mess. Windows Handlers and what not are a MF. OpenGL is a good graphics API, and though a bit complex, still easier to grasp than DirectX in my opinion.

Thats my 2 cents.