[flinty]

This sounds conceptually similar to how teaching CS or teaching programming to some one later in life focusses on algorithms data structures and other "inside baseball" concepts rather than asking them what is something you would like the computer to do for you or a real life application they would like to see in the world and show them the simplest path to getting a MVP of the thing they are interested in. Once they have that they will be more curious to build something else using their first experience as a base. Maybe a few months or a year or so later they would explore deeper concepts like learning data structures, algorithms and other optimizations