In a small way, yes, and throughout "three to seven", actually up until she was nine, we had a lot of fun with what I think I can call problems (especially while home-schooling during the pandemic, where we had time to keep going back to these from different angles). But I'm not able drum up much interest these days, so I was wondering if people here had any insights on what if anything has worked with tweens, as opposed to how the younger ones learn.
I learned basic trig around ~10 because I wanted to make spacewar/asteroids-like games, which led naturally into matrix math, later on.
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?
Personally, that's how most of my math learning came. As a teen, I started to program and wanted to understand mathematics tools to solve specific problems, so I learned trig, Bezier curves, cryptography, number theory, etc like this.
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.
I still have to make to that point, but answer from what I remember from my time there:
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.
Try dropping him in one of these math discord groups (for eg: Summer of Math Exposition)? Teens care a lot about social approval and seeing so many people having fun with math might help.
when i was 12,13 i really enjoyed the algebraic manipulation parts of calculus without having to think too hard about setting up problems. just practicing integration, differentiation and limits was a good start
> "Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back" —PH