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That was my thought with my step-son. Nope. He wants to play fortnite and football and nothing else matters - can't get him interested in it - thought I had hi

That was my thought with my step-son. Nope. He wants to play fortnite and football and nothing else matters - can't get him interested in it - thought I had him with a remote control plane but nope. The worst part is he is very bright but very lazy - he kills his homework and then has no intellectual curiosity at all and I've tried lots of things to see if he likes any of them. Now I just play fortnite with him and let him do his own thing til he shows an interest in anything.

theshrike79 6y ago
Try to get him into Minecraft or Roblox or something that requires more interactivity than Fortnite.
- xchaotic 6y ago
  FWIW, my kids play some Fortnite and Minecraft. They build some elaborate logic stuff with Redstone. I thought they’d be all over Boost and Mindstorms. Nope. Lego is just us old guys doing skeumorphism. My kids prefer pure software with no side effects and no need to cleanup afterwards.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    > I thought they’d be all over Boost and Mindstorms. Nope. Lego is just us old guys doing skeumorphism. LEGO is awesome. My kids liked building big LEGO stuff, love Minecraft, etc. But we never had success with Mindstorms at home. Now I'm becoming an educator and I run some robotics teams built around LEGO -- FIRST LEGO League, etc. With -structure- and -team identity- and -competition-, Mindstorms, WeDo, etc, are terrifically interesting. Enrollment maxes every year and the level of engagement from the kids in the program is very high. I hear stories from parents about kids evangelizing robotics to the cashier at the grocery market during checkout. :P Mindstorms suffers from being too open ended and too hard: you have to have a very high level of motivation to follow a project through to where you have something to be proud of. Without outside guidance and clear reasons to chase a goal for a long time (like doing well in competition), it all falls apart. edit: One thing I like about the FIRST stuff is that it's a bit of a trojan horse. It teaches some kids who are not very much into STEM to begin with a lot of STEM; but it also teaches a lot of kids who are deeply into STEM better collaboration and project management skills, how to speak well, and how to master subjective evaluations. Your best STEM kids tend to only learn a little about engineering and math from it, but they learn plenty of other things.
    - mrfusion 6y ago
      > you have to have a very high level of motivation to follow a project through to where you have something to be proud of. Without outside guidance and clear reasons to chase a goal for a long time (like doing well in competition), it all falls apart. Honestly that’s what every project I try feels like :-(
      - mlyle 6y ago
        Yup. Playing around with something trivial for a couple of hours is easy. Throwing away failed iterations over and over "for fun" rapidly becomes "not fun." And if there's a real chance basically no one will care if you succeed, why bother? There's unlimited things we -could- be doing, but only a limited number are worth it, so this is rational.
        gurjeet 6y ago
        I have suffered the too-many-languishing-side-projects syndrome for many years. To it was extremely satisfying when I was able to stick to one side-project for a few weeks, ironing out the kinks etc. and release my "Life on One Sheet" project [1]. Even though it did not get any love from Show HN, I have zero regrets about spending time on it because I finally shipped it in an acceptable form. [1]: https://q.ht/life-in-weeks-on-one-sheet/ https://q.ht/life-in-weeks-on-one-sheet/
        A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I hear ya. I am only now getting a little better about working through my project directory. I am not sure if that what it was, but house projects helped. It seems I get more invested if I do fair amout of prep work. Otherwise, it is too easy to let go.
  - mcphage 6y ago
    > My kids prefer pure software with no side effects and no need to cleanup afterwards. Also an infinite number of parts. Lego is cool, but the pieces are expensive :-(
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
Kids will be kids. I certainly spent more time playing games than was good for me. I just want to give em the exposure. What they do with it is up to them. My dad tried to show me basic shop skills. It wasn't meant to be. I almost wish he forced me now. It would have come in handy.
anon4242 6y ago
Hehe, I have a son like that too, he'll be 13 this year and I'm happy to say there has been a small increase in intellectual curiosity in the last six months or so. OTOH I also have a daughter who'll soon be 10 and she has the opposite problem, she's curious about everything (for instance she self-studies Japanese because she loves robots and sushi and wants to go to Japan and just the other day she learned the location of all 50 US states, just because, and we're not even Americans) but it also means she never really dives deeply into anything. So intellectual curiosity is good but it's not enough. These days I try to teach her grit, so she will stick to something even when it becomes a bit boring... Anyway, with my son I've found that when I include him and let him help with things I do around the house, like carpentering, he's much more interested than if I try something more "artificial" for lack of a better word. It's as he wants to do "real" things, because nothing beats a computer game when it comes to not being real.
- lsaferite 6y ago
  Be ecstatic with the curiosity and self-learning. Those are the skills that have served me well in life. Having a wide range of interests and never being a master in one is fine. The ability to teach herself a wide range of topics will open many doors.
  - davee5 6y ago
    More to the point, I believe the ability to foster connections between a wide variety of topics & ways of knowing will open many doors. Singular focus is not the unique path to success, aggregating knowledge and wielding it coherently (even if tenuously) is also quite potent. Consider every stereotypical intellectual TED talk you've seen, chances are it either goes deep on one idea or develops its uniqueness by combining ideas that create a new adjacency. Granted the "jack of all trades, master of none" phenomenon is real but it's still predicated on mastery of singular topics being the target. Breadth combined with sufficient depth to be dangerous, as well as the ability to communicate clearly, enables people to organize and align disparate ideas that people can rally behind. Every skilled product manager, marketer, and executive needs to be able to cross over from their core expertise, and general curiosity and the ability to dive into many things at once is fundamental to those sorts of successes.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I gave my little sister a robotics kit, and it was dismissed at first, but she got into it a month or two later. It doesn't hurt to put the options in front of kids and leave them be with it sometimes.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
If thats what he is interested in then game modding might be the bridge you seek. Game modding and private servers got me and most devs I know to this day into programming. Lots of games that are scriptable too. Garrys Mod being one. Minecraft being well known for the insane mods people make. Maybe even game creation too. All of the above were it for me though.
- hazz99 6y ago
  My intro to programming was deobfuscating the Minecraft sourcecode and then mix-and-matching the sourcecode from popular mods. It was great! Super frustrating but very rewarding.

theshrike79 6y ago

Try to get him into Minecraft or Roblox or something that requires more interactivity than Fortnite.

xchaotic 6y ago
FWIW, my kids play some Fortnite and Minecraft. They build some elaborate logic stuff with Redstone. I thought they’d be all over Boost and Mindstorms. Nope. Lego is just us old guys doing skeumorphism. My kids prefer pure software with no side effects and no need to cleanup afterwards.
- mlyle 6y ago
  > I thought they’d be all over Boost and Mindstorms. Nope. Lego is just us old guys doing skeumorphism. LEGO is awesome. My kids liked building big LEGO stuff, love Minecraft, etc. But we never had success with Mindstorms at home. Now I'm becoming an educator and I run some robotics teams built around LEGO -- FIRST LEGO League, etc. With -structure- and -team identity- and -competition-, Mindstorms, WeDo, etc, are terrifically interesting. Enrollment maxes every year and the level of engagement from the kids in the program is very high. I hear stories from parents about kids evangelizing robotics to the cashier at the grocery market during checkout. :P Mindstorms suffers from being too open ended and too hard: you have to have a very high level of motivation to follow a project through to where you have something to be proud of. Without outside guidance and clear reasons to chase a goal for a long time (like doing well in competition), it all falls apart. edit: One thing I like about the FIRST stuff is that it's a bit of a trojan horse. It teaches some kids who are not very much into STEM to begin with a lot of STEM; but it also teaches a lot of kids who are deeply into STEM better collaboration and project management skills, how to speak well, and how to master subjective evaluations. Your best STEM kids tend to only learn a little about engineering and math from it, but they learn plenty of other things.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    > you have to have a very high level of motivation to follow a project through to where you have something to be proud of. Without outside guidance and clear reasons to chase a goal for a long time (like doing well in competition), it all falls apart. Honestly that’s what every project I try feels like :-(
    - mlyle 6y ago
      Yup. Playing around with something trivial for a couple of hours is easy. Throwing away failed iterations over and over "for fun" rapidly becomes "not fun." And if there's a real chance basically no one will care if you succeed, why bother? There's unlimited things we -could- be doing, but only a limited number are worth it, so this is rational.
      - gurjeet 6y ago
        I have suffered the too-many-languishing-side-projects syndrome for many years. To it was extremely satisfying when I was able to stick to one side-project for a few weeks, ironing out the kinks etc. and release my "Life on One Sheet" project [1]. Even though it did not get any love from Show HN, I have zero regrets about spending time on it because I finally shipped it in an acceptable form. [1]: https://q.ht/life-in-weeks-on-one-sheet/ https://q.ht/life-in-weeks-on-one-sheet/
        A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I hear ya. I am only now getting a little better about working through my project directory. I am not sure if that what it was, but house projects helped. It seems I get more invested if I do fair amout of prep work. Otherwise, it is too easy to let go.
- mcphage 6y ago
  > My kids prefer pure software with no side effects and no need to cleanup afterwards. Also an infinite number of parts. Lego is cool, but the pieces are expensive :-(

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

Kids will be kids. I certainly spent more time playing games than was good for me. I just want to give em the exposure. What they do with it is up to them. My dad tried to show me basic shop skills. It wasn't meant to be. I almost wish he forced me now. It would have come in handy.

anon4242 6y ago

Hehe, I have a son like that too, he'll be 13 this year and I'm happy to say there has been a small increase in intellectual curiosity in the last six months or so. OTOH I also have a daughter who'll soon be 10 and she has the opposite problem, she's curious about everything (for instance she self-studies Japanese because she loves robots and sushi and wants to go to Japan and just the other day she learned the location of all 50 US states, just because, and we're not even Americans) but it also means she never really dives deeply into anything. So intellectual curiosity is good but it's not enough. These days I try to teach her grit, so she will stick to something even when it becomes a bit boring... Anyway, with my son I've found that when I include him and let him help with things I do around the house, like carpentering, he's much more interested than if I try something more "artificial" for lack of a better word. It's as he wants to do "real" things, because nothing beats a computer game when it comes to not being real.

lsaferite 6y ago
Be ecstatic with the curiosity and self-learning. Those are the skills that have served me well in life. Having a wide range of interests and never being a master in one is fine. The ability to teach herself a wide range of topics will open many doors.
- davee5 6y ago
  More to the point, I believe the ability to foster connections between a wide variety of topics & ways of knowing will open many doors. Singular focus is not the unique path to success, aggregating knowledge and wielding it coherently (even if tenuously) is also quite potent. Consider every stereotypical intellectual TED talk you've seen, chances are it either goes deep on one idea or develops its uniqueness by combining ideas that create a new adjacency. Granted the "jack of all trades, master of none" phenomenon is real but it's still predicated on mastery of singular topics being the target. Breadth combined with sufficient depth to be dangerous, as well as the ability to communicate clearly, enables people to organize and align disparate ideas that people can rally behind. Every skilled product manager, marketer, and executive needs to be able to cross over from their core expertise, and general curiosity and the ability to dive into many things at once is fundamental to those sorts of successes.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

I gave my little sister a robotics kit, and it was dismissed at first, but she got into it a month or two later. It doesn't hurt to put the options in front of kids and leave them be with it sometimes.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

If thats what he is interested in then game modding might be the bridge you seek. Game modding and private servers got me and most devs I know to this day into programming. Lots of games that are scriptable too. Garrys Mod being one. Minecraft being well known for the insane mods people make. Maybe even game creation too. All of the above were it for me though.

hazz99 6y ago
My intro to programming was deobfuscating the Minecraft sourcecode and then mix-and-matching the sourcecode from popular mods. It was great! Super frustrating but very rewarding.