Hand-eye co-ordination is best learned in the real world. Take him outside and play with real objects (I've heard it's called "catch") in a natural (non-human constructed) setting.

As for the other two things, typing skills and UI concepts, they can be trivially learned by him 10 years from now just as easily. He'll pick them up on his own before that, anyway.

How many of these would it take to, say, ray-trace Call of Duty: MW3 in real-time, 60 FPS? Would it cost less than using a modern graphics card to do the usual non-ray-traced rendering? That would be pretty cool.

Generally, three things motivate people:

  1. Autonomy - can they at least sometimes discover something on their own that needs doing/fixing and go ahead and do it without okaying it with management?
  2. Mastery - can they devote enough time to new things (e.g. technology) to feel that they are learning something *and* spending enough time on it to lead to mastery?
  3. Purpose - do they have a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves (as opposed to in name only: "there are six people in this group, therefore they are a team!")

These things drive most people and are completely lacking in my workplace. Search YouTube for "RSA Animate drive" for a better description than I gave.

Woot! Star Raiders rocks! I got introduced to it back in 1982ish (high school) and eventually bought a used Atari 800 *many* years later for $50. I use it a bit, then after being stored for some time I plugged it in and it wouldn't power up. :-( At some point I'll see if I can locate the problem. I have schematics and an old oscilloscope which I might be able to figure out.

All to play Star Raiders again, if I can figure out how to interface it to my LCD TV or projector.

Is that 1 Gb/s symmetric? Can you get close to that when transferring large amounts of data to someone next door or on the same block? That would be worth paying for. Here in Canada, I get 15 MB/s down, 1 MB/s up for C$45/mo. To get around the asymmetry, my neighbour (with whom I have line-of-sight) and I are setting up a 802.11g wireless link. Sad, but at least it's been fun. :)

I chose Skepticism, but that should probably be the broader "critical thinking". Most people think "skepticism" means "doubt everything at all times" anyway. Critical thinking covers things like logic as well. It's an important part of citizenship.