I agree that too easy example does not make a good demo for “how to explain difficult things”.
Maybe Complex Numbers would be a better topic, because you can start from really simple (an 8 years old kid should be able to understand C as a weird way of writing 2D coordinates) and progress towards complicated (exponentiation). Plus there is a great opportunity to use colors for C-to-C functions.
That said, “easy” is relative to the audience. As a challenge, you could take a smart 8 years old kid and try explaining as much about prime numbers as you can, in the time limit of 10 minutes. Do the same for a 10 years old, etc. (This is my pet peeve: There are many simple explanations of simple things which could be further simplified, but no one bothers to do that, because from the perspective of an adult, they seem already easy enough. Or because at some moment, too simple explanations just feel low-status. We need more and better distillation of all human knowledge. People say “you can’t be a polymath anymore, because we already know too much”. Yeah, but an average person could probably know 10x more than they do now, if our educational methods didn’t suck, because we stop at “good enough”.)
I agree that too easy example does not make a good demo for “how to explain difficult things”.
Maybe Complex Numbers would be a better topic, because you can start from really simple (an 8 years old kid should be able to understand C as a weird way of writing 2D coordinates) and progress towards complicated (exponentiation). Plus there is a great opportunity to use colors for C-to-C functions.
That said, “easy” is relative to the audience. As a challenge, you could take a smart 8 years old kid and try explaining as much about prime numbers as you can, in the time limit of 10 minutes. Do the same for a 10 years old, etc. (This is my pet peeve: There are many simple explanations of simple things which could be further simplified, but no one bothers to do that, because from the perspective of an adult, they seem already easy enough. Or because at some moment, too simple explanations just feel low-status. We need more and better distillation of all human knowledge. People say “you can’t be a polymath anymore, because we already know too much”. Yeah, but an average person could probably know 10x more than they do now, if our educational methods didn’t suck, because we stop at “good enough”.)