Advice/help needed for pupil who wants to learn

[beeswax]

There's a year 9 pupil at school who is very bright, likes programming etc, but who's in danger of going over to the dark side (as well as having his account disabled). You no doubt know, or have heard of these archetypes who find the pace and tenor of ICT tooooo slow, and so spend a lot of time devising scripts.
As this is not my strong suit, can anyone suggest online resources I can throw at him which will not only help him develop his undoubted skills, but hopefully rein him in during ICT?

Thanks

[ChrisH]

http://www.w3schools.com/

Plenty to get your teeth stuck into there.

[ryan_powell]

List of sites I use a lot for my programming:

http://www.codeguru.com/

http://www.hotscripts.com/ASP/index.html

http://www.javascriptkit.com/

http://www.freevbcode.com

Many more where they came from. If you want some more let me know.

All the best.

[Adam]

i'd recomend w3schools to start with, keep him amused with html and css for a while, then get him to learn Java. the sun site has lots of tutorials and such to help kids along..... and as it's the Object Oriented langauge of choice on degree courses, it'll set him up well for the future... it's also dead easy to get your head round to start with.

HTH

[contink]

Could do worse than get him to learn some PHP and then get him to put those energies to use with your joomla, etc... (assuming you go that route).

Various sites out there for tutorials (eg: http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/index.html) but it depends on how he likes to learn.. If he's the kind who likes to rip stuff apart, see how it works and then rebuild it then googling for php scripts is easy enough.

[mark]

It's really good if you can keep these kids on side. I've had both. Well worth the time invested IMHO if they play along. Involve them as much as possible and let them be party to special things that they can have input into.
We had a kid whose just finished Y11 who wandered off track. Needed SMT to step in to tame him a bit, which was pretty useless as usual SMT couldn't appreciate the problem and were far too lenient in my opinion.

[Joedetic]

Ohhh get him to do a bit of C...start him off with a bubble sort and get him to look at fopen fprintf and fclose...

That should keep him busy for a week or so...plenty of googling required.

Alternatively...get him a shell server setup and let him have a play about with that

[ChrisH]

Could do worse than get him to learn some PHP and then get him to put those energies to use with your joomla, etc... (assuming you go that route).

Various sites out there for tutorials (eg: http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/index.html) but it depends on how he likes to learn.. If he's the kind who likes to rip stuff apart, see how it works and then rebuild it then googling for php scripts is easy enough.

I have had to rip apart joomla in order to learn how to write an extension in php as I struggled to find a good resource for 1.0.x code. I do however have a nice little book for 1.5 when it becomes stable .