> It's about conceiving of the decomposition of problems on that level. It's about understanding what data is, so that when the student later learns a higher-level programming language, it sets expectations for what happens when you open a file, what kind of processing has to be done, etc. It's the basis for understanding abstractions that are built upon all those 1s and 0s, about the way that a program implicitly assigns semantics to them.

These are all things that are your goals, as the adult and teacher.

The student who wants to engage with programming and software likely has other goals in mind.

Skip all the crap you just mentioned, focus on helping them achieve their goals. I think you'll find those are usually more in the realm of "I want to make a game" or "I want to show my stuff to friends on a website" or "I want to make the computer play music" or [insert other high level objective that's not "learn about bits and bytes"].

Will that involve the stuff you mentioned? Sure will, and a student who feels like they're achieving the thing they want by learning that stuff is engaged.

But a student who gets to just sit there and listen to you drone on and on about "abstractions" and "instructions sets" and "data is code" and "semantics" all to end up with a complicated file that functionally just adds two numbers together? That student is usually bored and disengaged.