The thing that did it for me was building a "web browser" in VB6 using a printed book and copying the lines one by one. It was just a wrapper around a webview with a few buttons and text fields to navigate.

I think what I found amazing what that it was relatively easy to rebuild something that I used every day and that was immensely cool/useful.

So maybe help him rebuild a basic instagram / TikTok clone app on a mobile device?