Just don't do what my father did: buy a bunch of assembly / machine code reference manuals, sit me (aged 11) in front of a ZX Spectrum, and said "off you go!" and didn't help me understand anything in the books at all.
If you want your kid to learn, I think you should sit down with them, and learn alongside them. Start super simple, get something like a STEMMA/QT connection Trinkey and a gas sensor from Adafruit, plug them together and write a python loop to display the gas levels. You can call it a fart detector to get the kid interested.
That's a simple example that someone might say is too complex. Thing is, a kid generally has zero interest in loops, IO, libraries, etc etc. They may need to see and hold something for it to take priority over Fortnite or whatever. Other projects might be a do not disturb LED for their bedroom door. Or get a strip of LEDs and have them light up based on what they do in Fortnite or Minecraft (if that's possible)
Good luck, so many children have serious attention problems due to their saturation in social media.
He helped more about a decade later when getting me into DOS games: He'd configure AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS which I could then look at after he was done playing.
I'd attribute more to my own purchase of a PC when I was learning to walk after a road accident, and being part of the Windows 95 preview program. That got my foot in the door as a software tester and support tech. Becoming a sysadmin happened rapidly after that.
If you want your kid to learn, I think you should sit down with them, and learn alongside them. Start super simple, get something like a STEMMA/QT connection Trinkey and a gas sensor from Adafruit, plug them together and write a python loop to display the gas levels. You can call it a fart detector to get the kid interested.
That's a simple example that someone might say is too complex. Thing is, a kid generally has zero interest in loops, IO, libraries, etc etc. They may need to see and hold something for it to take priority over Fortnite or whatever. Other projects might be a do not disturb LED for their bedroom door. Or get a strip of LEDs and have them light up based on what they do in Fortnite or Minecraft (if that's possible)
Good luck, so many children have serious attention problems due to their saturation in social media.