Ask HN: 12 year old tech savvy girl – books, programs, events, advice?

I've noticed that kids do what they want to do, at best you can steer toward a general family of actions. If the adult wants electronics, and the kid wants to learn by playing with MIDI and XLR connectors and semi-pro audio stuff, trying to steer toward raspberry pi isn't going to work unless you're incredibly sneaky, but bringing home a pile of surplus audio gear from work will be pretty well received.

My dad had plenty of money but knew I'd be a better engineer and better artifex in general if I didn't have the most expensive stuff. I'm not saying buy kids junk, especially not safety related which should be top of the line, but I learned a lot more designing and making my own ham radio antennas than I'd ever have learned opening a box and assembling a kit antenna or even worse opening a box to reveal an assembled antenna. You'll never really learn how to take care of (expensive) tools until you're "forced" to use junk tools.

You can learn a shocking amount of good engineering by osmosis, especially with some "pro" guidance. Buy her a broken down motorcycle or dirtbike (if not a car) and have her tear every piece apart figuring out how each part works and where and how its worn and how to use tools and just how stuff works. Tear apart some old VCRs and DVD players (older the better... modern set top streaming boxes are mechanically boring). Take apart at least three traditional desktops and put the pieces together into at least one working, "maxed out" desktop. I disassembled my mother's oven when I was about her age, this is not some weird metaphor either, this was back in the days of mechanical timers and clocks and rube goldberg thermostats that none the less sometimes worked. Every kid should tear apart at least one vehicle transmission and one carburetor in their youth. And talk talk talk, unless the kid learns something about metal fatigue or electrochemical corrosion or how to put out cutting torch fires they're just destroying stuff. Your job is very boy scout adult, chill out other than "no you can't use my cutting torch in the garage, take it outside first" and similar safety violations. All kids like burning stuff although its only socially (semi)acceptable for boys. Notice how I can melt aluminum in that wood fire, but not steel, tell me what that means? If I get one thing across in this post its that kids need to take stuff apart almost as much as they need to build stuff.

I don't know the "tech" SV social media coding equivalent of tearing apart a broken down Honda CBR 150. When I was a kid it would have been breaking copy protection on 8 bit micros which was well within my/our ability. Maybe fun with a packet sniffer or mapping out other people's wifi access points. Maybe replicate a software exploit following the premade instructions for the exploit, then try it on similar software and see what happens.

https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman

Seconded. Advice on learning tech and science tends to contain a large amount of survivorship bias. A lot of people in these fields had some unusual, unstated quirk in their background that led them to do stuff like read K&R front-to-back while all of their friends were watching TV. It worked out great for them, but it's bad bet to hope it will work for a large percentage of kids.

Modding is advantageous because the feedback is often immediate and tangible -- small changes can result in appreciable results to a game world.

Working with game APIs, assets, and scripting is rarely elegant or academically pure, but the reward of accomplishing a successful mod produce a good incentive to learn real-world 'ugly' APIs. These are the sorts of systems that most people in tech have to interface with every day. By being introduced to these real-world systems early on, there is no jarring transition when arriving from a more learning-based environment.

I also was big into fan fiction when I started using the internet in my youth, so it was fun for me to make a website for housing my fan fiction and that of others. The fanfic website eventually got unwieldy to style each story's page separately, so my dad pointed me at PHP: I could use `include` tags to include the same header and footer on every page. Voila, I was programming! Then came MySQL so I could offer filtering options for pairing, rating, characters involved, etc.

So if your friend's daughter is into creative stuff outside of technology, you might have traction encouraging her to combine the two.