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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Your kid may want to skip college or go into the workforce and take night classes.

It's absolutely an option if you will allow it.  The traditional 4-year residential college is not for everyone.

I can see your kid bored/disinterested in many of the general requirements, as well as the intro level courses even in CS.

If anything, encourage your kid to start a hackathon competition team.  I bet he thinks the coding club is boring, but a competition team can just pull two or three other experienced coders and then enter Bishop Ireton, TJ, Blair, Georgetown, UMD.[/quote]

Don't listen to this. Truly bad advice.  Any higher level job wants a college degree.

It's best he be well rounded but if that's it, that's it.

Not all HS have computer science clubs.  Ours doesn't.[/quote]

not true.  if he is very talented he could get a job after high school and do quite well for himself.  if he has contacts who want to hire him, i don't think college is absolutely necessary.  look at some of the founders of the tech companies as examples.[/quote]

what he is doing now is beyond what they teach in college CS (from what I can tell but I'm a layman looking in at a world beyond me), [/quote]

Absolutely ridiculous, and it casts doubt on everything you said about his achievements, since you don't know what you are looking at.

Does he know low level hardware and assembly language? Has he written an operating system?  Written a compiler? Written a network driver? Designed and analyzed data structures? Studied formal languages? Built neutral networks from sctatch? [/quote]

Fair. Whenever I ask him to explain something, he has to start by defining basic concepts and terms because I don't know.

I can't answer all these questions but I'll try. [i]Does he know low level hardware and assembly language?[/i] Unsure. He knows C and C++, and some others. [i]Has he written an operating system? [/i]He's written a web framework. Don't know if that counts. [i]Written a compiler? [/i]Don't know. [i]Written a network driver?[/i] Don't know. [i]Designed and analyzed data structures?[/i] I think so. Working with data libraries are one of his main interests. [i]Studied formal languages?[/i] Yes. [i][b]Built neutral networks from scratch?[/b] [/i]Don't know. [/quote]
[/quote]

OP again with one addition. As to the last question, the reason I don't know is because I don't know what a "neutral network" is. I do know, however, that he builds from scratch. He wrote a passion project essay in middle school about why he thinks coding is taught incorrectly because students are taught to patch together snippets of prewritten code, and never really learn the basics.[/quote]

He's not wrong! Excellent college essay topic, btw

Coding and CS aren't the same thing though. College isn't, in fact, going to teach him much about python that he doesn't already know. But there's a lot of math, theory, etc. And it will let him discover if he wants to, for example, go to grad school.

I recommend asking him to read this book (free online): https://sicpebook.wordpress.com/ebook/

And go to MIT OpenCourseWare and explore some video lectures, problem set, etc
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-spring-2020/
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-004-computation-structures-spring-2017/
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-046j-design-and-analysis-of-algorithms-spring-2015/

He'll either get excited about college, or at least his disinterest in college will be better informed![/quote]

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