I read books during school. Looking back, this seems like it was a strongly suboptimal use of my time, because most of the books I read were fiction.
I think that homeschooling or tutoring are the strongest options, followed by private school. Around 12ish I went to CTY, which teaches classes at college speed, and felt that was almost as fast as I would have liked, which was worlds better than normal. They appear to have online classes now.
He's interested in computers and games- it might be worthwhile to focus 4 or so hours of his day into programming. Minecraft is moddable; there are similar games that focus on creating systems of things that do things. (Perhaps he would enjoy Spacechem? Not as "mess with the code" as I would like, but may at least be fun to think about.) (Someone to consider for inspiration: L Peter Deutsch.)
I strongly recommend against putting a gifted child in a school where they aren't within a level of the median student. The losses involved from going too slow are just too huge, and basically everything that school can do can be gotten more cheaply elsewhere. (The primary argument that everyone trots out- 'socializing' children- seems like it has a negative effect to me. I've gotten palpably easier to deal with the smarter the people around me have been, and got measurably higher grades the harder my classes were, and I know too many people who are so used to making friends by being locked in a room with other people that they don't know how adults make friends.)
Is it that unproductive to read a lot of fiction? I read extremely quickly and still retain a lot of what I read, and this seems to be quite a useful skill, and I've always assumed that one of the reasons I have this skill is because I read so much as a child. Admittedly, natural talent probably also plays a role, but surely the tremendous amount of practice helped a lot. And most of what I read as a child was fiction. Perhaps it would have been even more productive to read more non-fiction, but I'm not certain of that, and even if that were the case I'd have thought calling it "strongly" suboptimal was a little, well, strong.
Although my 8-year-old son likes his teacher, he is frequently bored at school. He attends a high quality suburban public school in the United States. He has a lot of traits in common with LessWrong readers, and we would like advice for what he can do to counter his boredom. Many of you must have found grade school more or less tedious. What were your coping strategies?