Advice for my nephews?

[jgamman]

I went home for Xmas and my nephews are getting into computers (mainly playing runescape on-line). I left the older one with a copy of Lutz 'Learning Python' and installed it on his desktop and showed the younger one how to make a simple html page and sent him a copy of 'A Kid's Guide to Creating Web Pages for Home and School' via amazon. you can't force anyone to be interested in a subject but i figured i'd open the door - this probably would have been enough for me at their ages. what would you have done?

[bayareaguy]

My kids already do plenty of simple web stuff on their computers at school so I generally encourage them to do other things at home.

My son has an iBook and my daughter has a MacBook. I got them both subscriptions to several online games years ago to get them through that stage as quickly as possible. They still like to play games, but now they are into the ones they can modify themselves.

Recently I installed Inform 7 and some text adventures on both their computers. I also wrote an incomplete adventure involving finding the owner of a lost dog at a local park. My daughter really enjoyed playing Zork and so I showed her how my small adventure worked. Now we've traded places - she's added more details to it and I do the playtesting.

[jgamman → bayareaguy]

that's a nice progression. i like the text adventure/add your own bits angle.