It was interesting that actually the expectation you have on the teacher are similar to the ones he has towards you. It was fun to teach each other simple tasks per zoom.
My opinion on teaching young kids programming:
As a counselor in summer camps I'm every summer shocked about the development of todays youth. I remembered the last summer camp I went was in 2019 and we made the "no phones allowed" rule. Every day we have a leisure hour where the participants are free to do whatever they want. They can go play ping pong, soccer, volleyball, cards, sleep etc.. Usually it's always been a busy hour since I was a participant myself. But things have changed. In 2019 with the new rule the counselor had kids coming to them asking them what they were supposed to do with their free time. Some were quite lost without their technical devices. We had to show them or propose to them what they could do with the time they had. It got better each day, less and less kids came asking for advice/help. Because of that I'm skeptical about starting to teach them too early.
I think that technology has a lot of advantages to offer to todays youth. But I'm very skeptical towards the result it might lead to if we teach them too soon. The more it becomes relevant in our lives the more it pushes/distracts us of our surroundings and nature away. We need to be aware that boredom is very important for our youth because boredom can be the birth of creativity.
My opinion on teaching old people technology:
What if we would disguise our todays computer as screens into the cover of an old computer which the participant knows/feel comfortable with? Would they be more comfortable, enthusiastic working with it because their more familiar with it?
I had an interesting discussion with a woman who lives for the summer at the coast and for the winter in Paris. She told me that she has no credit card, no technical devices except her phone(very old) and computer(old), which she uses very poorly to answer emails or check certain things. She said that she is shocked that today you don't get to choose if you want technology or not. At some point you are almost forced to. Paris for example changed all parking spots she used, to contactless or credit card payments. She went to the municipality to get some help, but they told her that they can't change it and that there is a parking spot with coins at a very distant place left. So her options were: get a credit card/smartphone with payment application or walk each day 30min to get to the parking spot. For an old lady these are not a fair options. However certain things she found cool about new technology like the weather app, the online beach view etc..
I think the directions we are heading leave not much choice and this makes a huge part of the resilience in older generations.