It depends if his motivation is to build something or to learn stuff. Personally, when I was that age, I couldn't care less about learning anything unless it di

It depends if his motivation is to build something or to learn stuff. Personally, when I was that age, I couldn't care less about learning anything unless it directly helped me achieve my immediate goals of whatever I was building. Turned out that was quite a lot. I learned about registers because I had to to optimize part of a game I was making. I wouldn't have sat down and studied some dry theoretical crap just for the sake of it. Block diagrams were a strong turn-off because you knew there would be no actionable information in them. Why do I care how this unit is connected to that unit? I just want to use the units! I'd naturally infer the structure of things once I was using them.