this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'.
> we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
I'm not sure kids who grew up with an iPad appliance are really more generally technically literate on average than GenXers who entertained themselves trying to write Choose You Own Adventure-type stories in BASIC on their Commodore 64s ... or who, at least, managed to get their pirated copy of Stellar 7 to run.
It used to be the GUI was basically the same as a CLI but with clicks instead of typing out "cp" "mv" etc. Now the GUI to CLI relationship is severed. You have an iPhone and the GUI it runs is basically running on top of the underlying CLI that apple hides from you (and you need to jailbreak the phone in order to gain access).
Imagine if Apple just gave these kids root and a terminal app, and the files app actually showed you the directory structure of the device. They could be scripting on these machines and learning about how they function same as we did growing up.
Instead, apple things we need to hold these kids hands and should learn Swift and other low code efforts instead. IMO these kids don't need an easy bake oven to learn to cook, they need a kitchen and the freedom to learn how to burn themselves like we had. Apple is afraid of letting their customers operate the stove they bought.
My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it.
I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.