In my experience, 8 year olds often ask more penetrating questions than adults. If they take an interest in understanding something, they often desire to understand it on the deepest level possible for them - quickly exceeding the capacity of their parent or teacher to explain (unless the adult is a 'renaissance person'). (Edit: or a competent teacher with adequate training relevant to the subject)
If the 8 year olds are really encouraged to explore and ask questions (vs 'jump through these hoops, follow instructions), the staff at apple will most likely be unable to answer their questions.
In elementary school we had philosophy classes, some got filmed for a documentary about it. It's all in french though, but I remember some very existential questions got asked (mostly once we got slightly older, I remember discussing life and death as well as suicide). Obviously we had never been taught anything about fallacies and critical thinking in general, but the simple exercise of open minded dialogue was pretty great for forming curious kids and we asked ourselves pretty deep questions.
Maybe jshevek means that they tend to ask "why" type questions which can be difficult to answer, as opposed to "how" type questions which are less difficult to answer.
Yes. The way that children use "why", it can mean "with what motive" but also "by what mechanism" or even "which events necessarily precede that" depending on context.
I would say that most adults are often simply unable to answer those questions because they just don't know. Children are naturally curious to levels which exceed the average adults ability to answer. Even educators are often inadequate to the task, if the question falls out of their areas of study. Some educators try to condition their students to focus on the limited prescribed domain of 'material they are to learn' and not ask questions that cross outside of that domain - in part to avoid acknowledging their ignorance.
But I would go further and say that children often also ask perfectly reasonable questions beginning with "how" and "what if" which stump adults. You can see this very readily when the topic is anything related to the natural world, as most adults are ignorant of basic science.
> Urgh, it is basics of coding course for 8 year olds. What do people expect?
Teaching neophytes (and, especially, neophytes who are also children) the basics of anything -- especially in ways that will engage them and not leave them both without knowledge and with less interest than when they encountered the teaching -- takes nontrivial knowledge of both the subject field and teaching methods.
