They are curious, and they do tinker with stuff when I'm there, but about 10 minutes after I leave the room they'll find a way to watch cartoons.
Somehow the internet has become this huge distraction and mostly just a replacement for a TV. I kinda miss what it was like in the 1990ies and early 2000s.
"Moving: There are few forces more powerful than geeks desperately trying to get internet in a new apartment."
If my parents turned off the internet, or just blocked youtube, my #1 mission would be to restore that service by whatever means possible.
Turns out, there was a line issue outside my house :P
Fun things are visual, immediate full of feedback and introspection, a sensible curve of difficulty and reward for effort
A raspberry pi doesn't spark joy, in fact most computers don't
I'm not exactly sure how we could do better but Bret Victor's talk inventing on principle and his other talks are always an inspiration
I'd love lots of custom project specific UI in my ide showing all kinds of things to help me out with my larger projects
The Python arcade package is also absolutely fun. We spent a day programming a Snake-clone, and some things like the predefined color names are just hilarious. (But I realised that building a game with a run loop is probably too hard for beginners)
My main problem is the difficulty part you mention: There's a pretty big step before you can do rewarding things like moving the player with keyboard control in a fun way.