What plagued even my generation with technology access, was that there was no guiding hand that took you right to the wizard behind the curtain to see how it al

What plagued even my generation with technology access, was that there was no guiding hand that took you right to the wizard behind the curtain to see how it all worked. Everyone you knew interacted with the computer from the most abstract way. And in turn, that's exactly the sort of pattern you picked up as well, using a GUI surfing the web, because that's all anyone could at best teach you to do. Today, that is still the case, but the abstraction has moved a notch further. Kids might not even have computers in the home anymore at all. They only learn to interact with technology through how they see their parents and peers use it: using a phone in a walled garden full of skinner boxes and other dystopian patterns. If more kids got more of a chance to be exposed to how the sausage is actually made, and learn how to actually take a computer they own and program with it in the same way every other developer programs with a computer (not some contrived learning language but exposure to the real tools), they'd probably be a lot less susceptible into falling into these patterns as they see them for what they are: energy draining time sinks. Empower them to think of the phone or computer as it actually should be: a tool that could run whatever you can imagine and write up on it, rather than basically a TV screen full of commercials in your pocket.