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palladias comments on Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school - Less Wrong
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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.)
I found CTY classes a little slow, but totally totally worth it for finding other people like me and making costumes, having discussions, doing network analysis on all hookups that had taken place during the session, etc.
I did CTY distance learning for writing and pre-calc. Didn't like the writing program, but really liked precalc and used it to skip in HS and was much happier as a result.
I on the other hand, got a very good experience out of the CTY distance writing program. It forced me to clarify my thoughts and be conscientious about how I wrote for the first time. Also, as an 11-year-old who had gone through life with few to no challenges, it was an excellent opportunity to really have to work hard at something.