Comment by jll29

What you say is true, but I'd like to add one point.

What's toxic for childrens' development is the low bar of entertainment associated with something like an iPad connected to the Web: immediately, without any effort, you get entertained, and there are hundreds of movies that you can watch. Got bored by them? There's millions of funny TikTok clips to view and share with outhers? Or go to the App store and download a million games by just one click each; none of it is any EFFORT.

In contrast, in the 1980s, you had to put some effort in, in order to eventually harvest your reward:

You may have wanted to play a game, but you had to type in 16 pages of hexadecimal DATA statements encoding the machine code of the came before being able to type RUN.

You may have wanted to draw a plane and make it fly across the screen, but you had to calculate the decimal numbers representing the sprite's bitmap by adding some powers of two.

You may have wanted to write your own game in MOS 6510 assembler, but you had to learn how to code first and what the registers and opcodes are, and you had perhaps a magazine article and a book and an assembler or machine monitor on a tape, and no Web to look up solutions to problems on StackExchange. Heck, you may not even have known anyone to exchange info - coming from a small town of 8000, I didn't even know who else had a computer if anyone. So at the news agent, after bying my monthly homecomputer magazine, I hang around at the newsagent to check who bought the two only other copies of the same magazine and then wave my copy and - shy as I was - and introduce myself.

The youngsters today - due to no fault of their own - have it too easy, so they naturally don't see the point to make any effort to learn "deep tech" because there's thousands of lower-effort activities that they can pursue first to entertain.

A device that boots right into µPython and that can make music & be programmed to make music could be one such successful path...