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Strong programming skills can enhance many other careers both for utility as well as the discipline of thought.

I've begun to think there is a largely overlooked brain drain where very gifted people are drawn into IT careers where they'll grind away making decent money but not having as big an impact as their potential might suggest. Though companies will pay well, the pay doesn't scale to output capabilities. A very intelligent experienced developer can produce 10 to 20 times as much code as an average newly trained programmer, but gets paid maybe twice as much. Should've seen the VP of HR pale a few years ago as I explained why I wanted to change three programming positions into two principal engineer positions.

Along the lines of Dude's suggestion, I would suggest your son look for an Open Source project that catches his passion and learn new technologies in that context and tap other developers for insight and help. It's skill building, application building (both kinds), and potentially career building as well as possible community service creds if his school tracks that.

Great ideas, Dude! I would have never thought of having him analyze our home finances!! (I am sure he'd have some great suggestions for spending our retirement savings…)

He has done iPhone apps and Minecraft mods, and will likely think of more he wants to do. He likes to post videos of him playing Minecraft (I know its a thing, but still trying to wrap my head around it), and he recently wrote a program to automatically smoothly pan the scene being recorded past specified guide points. Dh gave a hand with the algorithm but ds programmed and debugged the whole thing!

So yeah, a steady stream of engaging projects is great for learning. But maybe combined with a little formal instruction and contact with like minded peers….

Another great idea - I am so glad I asked about this.

But a dumb question - can you advise on how he might go about finding Open Source projects that align with his interests?

Here's a good place to start: http://sourceforge.net/

I'm somewhat of a technological dilettante (name the operating system, and I've probably supported it in some capacity or other), which has brought me into contact with a number of IT communities, and in my experience the open source community provides the best peer-to-peer support, bar none. If he gets stuck on something and needs help, there are forums out there that can be a great resource. So that's another benefit of going Zen's route.

Agreed, Sourceforge is the place to start. Just searching on Minecraft yields a ton of projects. I haven't worked on something at Sourceforge in quite a few years, and wow their search mechanism is really impressive.

I've always learned programming from doing; so, no suggestion on courses for that per se. But as an alternative, I would suggest supporting classes like discrete math, predicate logic, and more abstract computing courses like https://oli.cmu.edu/courses/free-open/computing-course-details/ . Other non-programming courses to look for would be like operating systems theory or object oriented design (if you can find it decoupled from a language.)

There is also so much available now online for free. My son took Aops Python in MS, AP (Java based) early in HS but is absolutely thrilled with the selection of MOOCs available through Coursera, Edx and Udacity. Courses he has completed have included, Intro to Programming; Udacity, Intro to Logic;Stanford, Algorithms:Crunching Social Networks; Udacity, Game Theory;Coursera/ Stanford and the University of British Columbia; Intro to Computer Science and Programming MITx; Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computing; Berkely Edx; and Machine Learning; Coursera/Stanford.

I think he I now doing some Linux Course. There has probably been overlap but each course has held some unique value for him (or he wouldn't take them).

He is so thankful these courses are available to him.

Another option you might consider is letting your DS enroll in MOOCs. He won't get credit, but he can drop out with no penalty if a course is too difficult, too boring, or he's got too much school work to do. There are tons of CS courses from great institutions. Coursera offers CS classes from Stanford and Johns Hopkins while edX offers courses from MIT and Harvard. Some of the CS specialists here might take a look at what's offered and give you some suggestions that look good for your DS.