Hypercard for coding was interesting because it relied on message-passing with a handler hierarchy that introduced modularity questions.
Small, accessible and visual languages are interesting for learning to the extent they enable you (your son) to explore on his own. But they're very frustrating because the delta between what you want and what you can do is so large, especially now that we're miles beyond hypercard/scratch in functionality.
The essential idea of coding is encoding: what behavior do you want, and how can you (most economically) represent the data and processes required?
Consider whether thought experiments would be a better way for your son and you (as a marketer) together to learn about encoding. If you focus together on learning how to think like a coder, it could be fun (instead of frustrating to drag through arcane syntax of toy languages).
The most powerful encodings are scale-invariant; the most interesting are generative. So you could start by thinking about the game of life, or fractals.
The other thing for an 11-year-old is teaching them to learn how to learn. Go with him down a rabbit hole of programming tiktoks/videos, and then step back to reflect on each, try to come up with categories, figure out how to find related topics and approaches, and summarize your results - then review them later and pull them into conversations to reinforce them. Start to see the math and encoding of life situations. Build mental models for getting frustrated (and reward systems generally), the game theory of competition, etc. -- things that will be relevant in teen years.
Small, accessible and visual languages are interesting for learning to the extent they enable you (your son) to explore on his own. But they're very frustrating because the delta between what you want and what you can do is so large, especially now that we're miles beyond hypercard/scratch in functionality.
The essential idea of coding is encoding: what behavior do you want, and how can you (most economically) represent the data and processes required?
Consider whether thought experiments would be a better way for your son and you (as a marketer) together to learn about encoding. If you focus together on learning how to think like a coder, it could be fun (instead of frustrating to drag through arcane syntax of toy languages).
The most powerful encodings are scale-invariant; the most interesting are generative. So you could start by thinking about the game of life, or fractals.
The other thing for an 11-year-old is teaching them to learn how to learn. Go with him down a rabbit hole of programming tiktoks/videos, and then step back to reflect on each, try to come up with categories, figure out how to find related topics and approaches, and summarize your results - then review them later and pull them into conversations to reinforce them. Start to see the math and encoding of life situations. Build mental models for getting frustrated (and reward systems generally), the game theory of competition, etc. -- things that will be relevant in teen years.