Maybe they’re reading a play like Waiting For Godot and they just don’t understand it. Start at the beginning of the year by modeling not only what it’s like to give a point of view but to respect the point of view of others. Get your students in the habit of saying the words...
Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh.. I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and ...