Seems like a wholesome venture to me. After all the very foundations of computing rely on the ability to differentiate between two states. It is only by convent

Seems like a wholesome venture to me. After all the very foundations of computing rely on the ability to differentiate between two states. It is only by convention we call them "1" and "0", and historical circumstance that we (mostly) use vast arrays of nanoscale transistors in SRAM and DRAM to represent almost all modern states. But any system that has (at least) two distinguishable states is a valid basis for computation. So projects like this are not just fun but remind us of the fundamental arbitrariness of our interpretations. The next project I'd like to see from him (assuming he's not serious about quitting!) is the use of checkboxes to represent the layout of RAM in a simplified computer, and the state of a CPU registers and pc, such that the grid represents an input and a sequence of binary-encoded instructions. Might be simpler to define your own architecture, or pick a simple one like ARM. Using this, implement a simple, ideally recursive, algorithm like finding the gcd of two inputs. (Hopefully the state is actually stored in the checkboxes and not just treated as a rendering of some other more conventionally modeled internal state, such that if you slowed down execution and started clicking you'd get...interesting results.)