have you tried TFA's tack of, instead of throwing him on the mercy of the school exercises, presenting a problem or two?
> "Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back" —PH
> "Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back" —PH
Parsing also interested me around ~12 (text games this time), but while I made some mechanical attempts, the theory never clicked until much later.
Sometime around that time I learned about recursion by reverse-engineering the display code for a tile based first-person maze crawler one of my father's colleagues had written. (yes, fib should've been simpler, but drawing those perspective walls was way more concrete)
[perspective was luckily something I'd been introduced to in second grade, so it was old hat at this point, and the scaling math was straightforward; the only jump I needed to make was grokking that having drawn the walls visible from this square, one could use the same routine, with fresh parameters, to draw the walls from all the still-visible neighbouring squares, etc. Unfortunately z-buffers make this entire approach obsolete; but maybe he'd take it as a challenge? this is trivial with z-buffering, but how might it even be possible without?]
Might Processing sketches (or whatever the new shiny might be) interest your kid?
Then later between my love of point and click adventure games and puzzles plus the fact that I had good foundations in maths, pure mathematics problems became increasingly fun.
Abstract math, or "math per se" was utterly uninteresting for me. My drive was to solve actual problems I had or wanted to solve. For example, making something out of wood with complex shapes, or drawing with the computer. I would say you have to find an area of interest with which the kids get passionate, and needs math to solve the problems.