Nope. He wants to play fortnite and football and nothing else matters - can't get him interested in it - thought I had him with a remote control plane but nope.
The worst part is he is very bright but very lazy - he kills his homework and then has no intellectual curiosity at all and I've tried lots of things to see if he likes any of them.
Now I just play fortnite with him and let him do his own thing til he shows an interest in anything.
Anyway, with my son I've found that when I include him and let him help with things I do around the house, like carpentering, he's much more interested than if I try something more "artificial" for lack of a better word. It's as he wants to do "real" things, because nothing beats a computer game when it comes to not being real.
Consider every stereotypical intellectual TED talk you've seen, chances are it either goes deep on one idea or develops its uniqueness by combining ideas that create a new adjacency.
Granted the "jack of all trades, master of none" phenomenon is real but it's still predicated on mastery of singular topics being the target. Breadth combined with sufficient depth to be dangerous, as well as the ability to communicate clearly, enables people to organize and align disparate ideas that people can rally behind. Every skilled product manager, marketer, and executive needs to be able to cross over from their core expertise, and general curiosity and the ability to dive into many things at once is fundamental to those sorts of successes.
I just want to give em the exposure. What they do with it is up to them. My dad tried to show me basic shop skills. It wasn't meant to be. I almost wish he forced me now. It would have come in handy.
LEGO is awesome. My kids liked building big LEGO stuff, love Minecraft, etc. But we never had success with Mindstorms at home.
Now I'm becoming an educator and I run some robotics teams built around LEGO -- FIRST LEGO League, etc. With -structure- and -team identity- and -competition-, Mindstorms, WeDo, etc, are terrifically interesting. Enrollment maxes every year and the level of engagement from the kids in the program is very high. I hear stories from parents about kids evangelizing robotics to the cashier at the grocery market during checkout. :P
Mindstorms suffers from being too open ended and too hard: you have to have a very high level of motivation to follow a project through to where you have something to be proud of. Without outside guidance and clear reasons to chase a goal for a long time (like doing well in competition), it all falls apart.
edit: One thing I like about the FIRST stuff is that it's a bit of a trojan horse. It teaches some kids who are not very much into STEM to begin with a lot of STEM; but it also teaches a lot of kids who are deeply into STEM better collaboration and project management skills, how to speak well, and how to master subjective evaluations. Your best STEM kids tend to only learn a little about engineering and math from it, but they learn plenty of other things.
Honestly that’s what every project I try feels like :-(
There's unlimited things we -could- be doing, but only a limited number are worth it, so this is rational.
Also an infinite number of parts. Lego is cool, but the pieces are expensive :-(
Lots of games that are scriptable too. Garrys Mod being one. Minecraft being well known for the insane mods people make.
Maybe even game creation too. All of the above were it for me though.