You are mistaken about that "recent" part. Parents have always wanted their kids to go to best schools and learn for well paying, prestige jobs. It's just that what is well paying has changed.
Why wouldn't I want my kids to be interested in something that will get them good start in life, that could be groundwork for their future careers ASSUMING it is fun for them and they are doing this out of their own volition?
That would teach them you can have fun doing science or technology rather than treating is as a necessary evil?
I would justs try, not to put too much pressure on him (or you) to make progress with your project, when he wants to do other things. And in fact, don't forget to motivate him to do other things, like play outside with friends in the actual dirt. Or with you. That is very important for his motoric, social and immune skills, too. In general, just being a kid. With not too much responsibilities and just being able to play freely. 1.5 h of serious work and learning every day do sound a bit much, if that means, it is cut from the outside time with you.
You can also combine being outside with the project, by having pen and paper around to discuss and write things that come to mind ...
Oh - and of course: have you considered Lego Mindstorms? I had great success with it, teaching nephews the basic of robotics. With something they can touch. And the ability to work with their hands and minds, as this involves also designing of the chassis and the arragnement of sensors, etc. In general, LEGO is very accessible. So I would start with that, before turning into a more serious base of actual robots.
Got 51515 from Santa:)
Parents haven't even always wanted their kids to go to school.
FTFY
It's like when students learn MatLab. While much closer to regular software engineering than spreadsheets, it is still different enough for all the wrong basic concepts to sneak in and manifest. Switching to a classic programming language afterwards might actually be harder that way (not only learn all the new stuff, but unlearn/unlink the old stuff).
Or put another way, a skill or service being a vocation just means it's useful enough for enough people, so that society can support it functioning as a distinct job (or set of jobs). The more useful it is, the more demand there is for that job - but that also means the more useful it is to know the basics yourself. A random Joe or Jane doesn't really need to know how to x-ray stuff to find material defects, but they sure as hell will benefit from knowing how to wash their own clothes, fix their own faucets, balance their own books, ... and how to automate this and that in their use of computers.
And yesterday I completed the first part of my prototype "gaming couch" and made sure those of my kids who cared could see how I did it.
For an extreme example, Eve Online is a game that makes kids do feats in spreadsheets that set them up straight for careers in accounting and supply chain management.
But less extreme: if your game exposes numbers, spreadsheets are useful to play with them. If I knew more about Excel when I was 13, I'd probably retype unit stats from StarCraft into it and do the maths that I ended up doing in my head. Spreadsheets have plotting functions, which are a fun thing to play with. Also tracking my own magazines & CDs is something I remember doing as a kid - entirely doable in Excel, though in my case, this was my first exposure to Access and RDBMSes in general.
Also worth noting that a proper spreadsheet like Excel is in itself a functional reactive programming REPL. FRP is what you do when you play with formulas.
Spreadsheets are a great visual way of programming up to a certain point.
Spreadsheets are great for maths, planning projects, tracking experiments/collecting data, ... which I'd also all attribute to things "STEM-ish kids" might do.