Six Months of Teaching My Middle-School Nephew to Code

Starting last summer vacation, I tried teaching my nephew (8th grade) to code. To get to the point, trying to teach 'coding' was a mistake.

At first, I started him on Python syntax, but he lost interest within two weeks. It was inevitable when he was just writing print statements 20 times. So I completely changed direction.

The new approach was this:

• Week 1: Building a house with Minecraft commands
• Weeks 2–4: Making a simple shooting game with Scratch
• Weeks 5–8: Resizing 100 images at once with Python
• Week 9 onward: Anything he wanted to make himself

The last stage was the key. What my nephew chose was a program to automatically collect YouTube comments. A kid who didn't even know what crawling was found Selenium on his own and attached it within a week. It made me realize that if there's something they want to do, they'll do it even if they have to search for it.

Now he knows basic Python syntax to some extent. If I had done it in the opposite order, even six months later he'd still be typing only print.

If anyone has taught kids before, I'd appreciate some advice on what to have him do next.