You can't do everything at once and git is counter-productive on day one, and the most important thing was they find programming remotely interesting at all.
The next most important thing is always working on a new copy.
How exactly you make those new copies barely matters at all compared to just having them at all.
Using something arcane and unforgiving and inscrutable and complex like git to accomplish those copies is way way down on the list.
The new student is barely interested in the actual coding to make a game if you're lucky. They would rather mow lawns than learn administriva like git.
It could even be argued as irresponsible to hand git to babies and expect everything to be fine. Just because we all have about 5 git commands we use 99.9% of the time, and have no problem 99% of the time because we learned how to "hold it right" and just always carefully do things in the right order, does not mean git can actually be made safe and simple. Those 5 or so commands aren't actually enough.