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Probably the same. From what I can tell, "technically precocious boy" means the same thing as "technically precocious".

It's a no-win situation for the researchers.

Do they even bother to clarify what they mean by "technically precocious"? I've seen some references to the MIT hacker culture in the OP, but back in the day this was strictly about a tiny minority of people in the most technical parts of academia; by and large, children would not have had any exposure to computers for personal use until very late in the history of that culture, and the research questions about "constructivism" were precisely about how to make this kind of exposure educationally meaningful. I suppose that I'm seeing a lot of fuzzy, loosely-connected memes in the intro to the book but not much clear thinking and reasoning that would result in an intelligible argument.

The problem is that if you assume "being able to use a device" is what qualifies you as precocious then the argument becomes moot. But I'm not sure what else the authors could mean.

"constructivism", and similar ideas about schools with no lessons where children just learn what they want to, are all based on children of smart parents who encourage such things.

The average child is happy watching youtube videos about unboxing single use plastic toys 24/7

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