As a father, a coder by profession, a life-long enthusiast, with a son who is a carbon copy of myself and on the cusp of being a teenager, I haven't found the a

As a father, a coder by profession, a life-long enthusiast, with a son who is a carbon copy of myself and on the cusp of being a teenager, I haven't found the answer... and kind of gave up looking for it. I came up on BASIC, Pascal, MUDs, C, internet in realtime as it was invented in the 90s. I was obsessed with early Japanese RPGs and comics, cards, all that shit. I'm of the "multimedia generation", when CD-ROM was the future, and dialing up to CompuServe finally offered a real TCP/IP connection to browse the web. I really thought I wanted to make games for a living -- I wanted to go to DigiPen. I worked through Andre LaMothe books front to back. I tore apart DikuMUD source to learn C before even learning some basic 7th-grade Spanish, let alone grasping how C actually worked. My parents just left me alone, they didn't understand anything I was doing and didn't pretend to, and it was kind of a gift lol. A couple decades later, here comes this brilliant kid who has all the same tendencies and proclivities -- he graduates from an iPad to a PC and instantly takes to it, but in ways that don't make sense to me. His waypoints are Minecraft and Roblox. I learn both so I can at least keep up with his interests and offer advice / help when it's asked for. He's now many years into both, and he's an incredible Minecraft builder / modder / redstone dude, learning almost everything from YouTube videos all on his own. I had no teachers so I taught myself as well, usually from books instead of really amazing videos. In Roblox, he's a great builder, but struggles with some of the 3D modeling, file/code organization, spatial grasp of the object-oriented nature of the Roblox API. I've written plenty of code for him and most hasn't sunk in, but I think eventually it will. He wants to learn JavaScript, so I suggested we make some simple browser games -- Tic-Tac-Toe, etc, which culminated in him conceiving this fantastic arcade-style fishing game -- I built out the basic mechanics on top of Phaser, but by the time I had a really solid first level together that we could rebuild together for learning and fun, he was bored and back to Minecraft LOL I realized that I never wanted a (present, in-person, active) teacher, and apparently this kid doesn't either. I'm now just letting him use me as a sounding board and helper, I guess a "guru" he can query, but otherwise I just encourage and facilitate him finding the information he wants rather than dictating process and procedure. There's no better teacher than the undeniable voice inside your own head that tells you you need look, explore, try, fail, and succeed, on your own. Hilariously, he tends to listen and learn from his actual school teachers, who objectively don't know shit about code and technology, but they INSPIRE, they're palatable, they're role models he excitedly accepts information from and runs circles around. Sometimes you have to have those outside influences that aren't as comfortable as the resources you have at home, and I have a lot of respect for that. Anyways, long rant, but there's really something to be said about (proverbially) taking your kid to the library, winding them up, and letting them loose; I haven't had much luck going down the path of curriculum and process. You just want to light the fire and point them in the right direction. Follow their lead. They'll take you along with them further than you could ever have imagined!