Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?

Color me surprised if the curriculum involves VBA or conditional formulas. Lego mindstorms might suit the OP in terms of creative And computational successor to hypercard.

The problems that they give these days are either poorly thought out or just don't make sense to do without technological assistance. I think it is the former rather than the latter. Today's technology isn't needed to learn most of the concepts that are required to excel later in life, and my daughter is probably not going to be using pivot tables as an adult. I do think that word processing is a hell of a lot faster than having to do corrections with a typewriter, though. But the extra time having to think before you typed, or wrote for that matter, was a good thing. Today kids are being trained to just spit out online or in a text whatever comes into their head. That is going to be a disaster.

This old version of Microsoft Works had a complete interactive tutorial on all the parts of the suite (Word processor, spreadsheet, database). A big part of our time learning computers was going through that tutorial. It was actually interesting and fun calculating numbers in the spreadsheet and advancing the tutorial.

To this day, my understanding of Excel comes from my time in that class. It's certainly not the worst class I had with computers in my lifetime.