Thank you for your detailed answer! I enjoy hearing about other programs and experiences. I didn't have the benefit of something like this growing up, so I have to guess a fair bit about what is helpful and will only know for sure 15 years from now when my former students might tell me.
> What have they done with their little computers? Anything notable? If you can share, please do.
We only really picked up the computers themselves in the last 2-3 weeks of class; we were much more into theory and logic. I provided some system calls to move sprites around on the top of the screen, so there were some simple games written using that... and one student implemented a game inviting you to guess the computer's number.
> Basically, the teacher asked is to declare what we were going to try and do and that was more about making sure we did something besides play games than it was anything else.
This sounds really awesome. This sounds like what I try to do with after-school robotics.
My (older) brothers had a really awesome educational experience where the local district had set up something they called "Independent Learning Module" and later "Kleine Schule" that was very much self directed.
Education is much more regimented now-- whether in public schools or private schools. All the emphasis on standards, unified curriculum, alignment and articulation of courses to colleges, etc, have certainly improved the depth of education and likely improved the average quality of education. But these changes also make it harder to offer an experience like this.
Perhaps the pendulum is slowly starting to swing the other way, with a lot of discussion of "student agency".
From the after-school program-- it's interesting how students struggle at first with setting the agenda. I have high achieving students who breeze through all kinds of things that I think of as difficult. But then other things, like organizing a set of to-do items onto a calendar to make a coarse schedule, often seem daunting to the students and cause paralysis.