> This "oh crap, I've bust it" moment is the precursor to learning!
Unless of course you end up with device you can't use and then go do something elsw. It is just not true that kids would universally figured it on their own, especially when the issue is deep in settings.
Frankly, people here imagine idealised version of themselves and then expect it to be norm. That would be like artist imagining that all the kids love drawing and high quality crayons are all they need and then being shocked that most of them just can't do it.
And double so kids for who computer is something expensive for work and not a toy. So if they broke it parent is locked out of work till they find someone who will fix it and the kid won't get access again.
And tripple so kids who are not English native speakers and don't understand words on screens.
As far as I know, the obvious difference comes down to depravation.
If you have a computer that does all sorts of important things, like work, or even playing games, then exploring how it works isn't the obvious first thing that comes to mind for interacting with it.
But if you have a computer that doesn't really have any use-cases that you personally care about, exploring how it works is pretty much the only thing you there is to do, when playing around with it.
Similarly, if you break your computer while exploring it, and you have plenty of other things to do, then you'll maybe give up on your explorations.
But if you break your computer and you have nothing else to play with, you'll see the breakage as an obstacle in the way of your continued entertainment—sort of like you might see the Internet being down—and try to figure out how to get it back up and working again. You might not succeed, but it's the attempt to get it working that builds the "engineering mindset", not the success per se.
I'm a programmer today mostly because: my parents weren't always around to bug; I didn't live near-enough to friends to always have them over or visit them; and I didn't own any video games, but merely rented them (mostly timed to when said friends came over.) Then, when I was 9-or-so, my family got a computer that ran Windows 98, had no Internet connection, and had no games installed. I "played" with it by poking around in MS Paint and discovering the hidden sets of system MIDI files; but also by doing weird things like making "Briefcases" just to see what they did; or creating desktop shortcuts to nothing-in-particular just so I could put some of the "cool" icons from pifmgr.dll on my desktop, as if I was collecting game power-ups.
Unless of course you end up with device you can't use and then go do something elsw. It is just not true that kids would universally figured it on their own, especially when the issue is deep in settings.
Frankly, people here imagine idealised version of themselves and then expect it to be norm. That would be like artist imagining that all the kids love drawing and high quality crayons are all they need and then being shocked that most of them just can't do it.
And double so kids for who computer is something expensive for work and not a toy. So if they broke it parent is locked out of work till they find someone who will fix it and the kid won't get access again.
And tripple so kids who are not English native speakers and don't understand words on screens.