My son was two when he could operate the ipad, go to youtube find his movie. That's not because he could read or knew what he was doing, but because he had learned to mimic how I did things.
So the kids might learn the commands and there might be a lot of value in that. But I do not believe that they are actually internalizing and learning fundamentals in any intelectual sense.
Anyway it's kind of a hard subject. I think it's great what the OP is doing but I fear he is reading a little too much into the reaction from the kids. Unless of course they are gifted with a high IQ (which might very well be the case)
I have to respectfully disagree with you on this point. A member of my extended family does extensive work with deaf young children (aged six months to six years). Her job is to accelerate their spoken-language development, which has been delayed by virtue of being deaf. She repeatedly makes the point to me that the difference between children with delayed language (e.g. most of those she works with) and a "normal" child is that those with delayed language tend to not understand (or use) abstractions in their speech. They treat each word as if it has a single application or use. Once they understand that each word actually can have multiple applications, their ability to learn new words grows exponentially. Until that point, they are simply mimicking.
That sounds like an abstract fundamental to me, though I am perhaps mistaken. (This is also subject to a counter-argument about the nature/nurture aspect of language, e.g. do we have an inborn understanding of language.)
Also, on a more personal note: by the time I was five, I was experimenting with electrical circuits. A few 1.5V flashlight bulbs, a pair of switches, a few D-cell batteries, and some wire went a long way. I taught myself that you couldn't put lightbulbs after each other and have them light up to the same brightness (e.g. series resistance), but that you could connect them in parallel without any of those effects (these were short-term, so I didn't notice the extra power draw). Likewise for switches -- if they were in parallel, then breaking one was enough to break the entire circuit. Those are brand-new, abstract concepts that I was, as you say, internalizing in an intellectual sense.
And no, I wouldn't have called my IQ particularly high at the time, and I still would not.
I am not saying there is no understanding going on at all. What I am saying is that when my son uses the iPad or iPhone he does not know what the different things mean (i.e. he can't read that it says Video) he just knows what it do when he presses the icon.
I can't say to him:
"Find the LinkedIn application"
Only if I have done that a couple of times in front of him will he be able to.
With regards to the discussion about language, then yes that is a very complex discusion :)
My own theory is that we are born "pattern recognizing feedback loops" and thus our ability to recognize those patterns and recognize that we recognize them is the foundation of our ability to learn a language. Language is simply an abstraction of our natural ability to do symbolic manipulation.
It's like assembler (our basic symbolic manipulation skills) and the higher level languages (our more developed culturally inherited languages)
The fundamentals of language are getting pinned down at the same time in their little heads, and children who start training any skill at such an age tend to become proficient at it. I don't see why this can't be the case with computing as well.
My son uses the command line. Just not for anything but hammering in random text.