But CS is not engineering, CS is a branch of mathematics. I studied Finance at university and I've seen people complaining how it doesn't teach you how to invest in stocks and do M&A. Later, talking to professionals about what they do in their jobs I realized that what I'm being tough is adjastent, but they are not preparing you for a job. It's not like medicine where you get placements and they literally train doctors. Same with Computer Science, it's not software engineering and while the two are obviously adjacent. Damn I'm 6 years into my software engineering career as a self-taught guy, and I've contributed, implemented, and released projects that work well in the real world for non-trivial companies, but I am only now learning about algorithms and CS theory as a side project.
I think bootcamps try to fill that field but most of the ones I've seen are quite trivial, getting you through the basics. If you're asked to implement 10 greenfield CRUD APIs and then go to a job and have to maintain some huge monolithic repo it's going to be hard.
I think an educational approach where the curriculum involves some sort of "For this task, you have to change this thing in this codebase and deploy it without crashing the thing", "refactor this code base", giving people some sort of project and then switching it up in the middle would be valuable because it's mostly what software engineers do day to day: write tests, fix bugs, implement features in existing projects.
I would recommend you give them something with short feedback loops, where they get a sense that they're doing something and can actually see it. I think this will peak their interest and see that "Oh, I did that, what else can I do?"
I was twice their age when I began learning how to code and the first time I saw the 200 OK with a "Hello, World!" on my API something in my monkey brain just clicked and I just wanted more.