Our son is 12 also, and I've been introducing him to programming over the last year, in phases: 1. We installed Scratch, and let him learn that. 2. After he g

Our son is 12 also, and I've been introducing him to programming over the last year, in phases: 1. We installed Scratch, and let him learn that. 2. After he got good at Scratch, I installed Love2d and helped him write a few really tiny games in Lua. 3. Last Christmas we bought him the book "Sam's Teach Yourself Minecraft Modding in 24 hours" by which he slowly learned the basics of Java. 4. This weekend he borrowed a 9-books-in-1 book for Java which he's using to port his Pong game from Lua to Java in, using a custom JComponent. That's the order that's working for him. He's well on his way to being able to write things like 2048. Not there yet, but soon.