teach them some fundamentals...what is a bit, what is a tube, how the tubes get plugged together,
maybe how dns works at a high level just to give them some example of a simple distributed system,
and give some meaning to web addresses.
what a trivial von-neumann machine looks like
what a program is at a high level, how images are represented and manipulated.
how to write a simple game in something like scratch.
what you describe seems pretty tortuous for a 9th grader (learning gimp, ooo), even for one that
has an interest
actually give them some semantic reference for dealing with computers, rather than teaching them
about the details of the current crop of open source menu-driven applications