yes?
notepad's entire front end is an edit control slapped onto the barebones minimal Win32 example
they wouldn't need to understand all of it, only to make small additions based on modifying what's already there:
- adding the edit control (as discussed)
- add Open/Save items to the existing example menu
- a few lines in the event loop to implement that functionality
as a kid I had a "games programming" book that showed how to do everything necessary to do this
admittedly kids these days aren't going to be interested in programming for a dead API (Win32)