final fieldwork part 1

I am having serious questions about how my lesson would have gone with an “ordinary student.” Why would any student be ready and willing to examine a camera for this long? What should I have done to make the encounter with the “it” of the subject matter more engaging? We didn’t get to do the sunprints because it was raining, but what could I have done instead that would have been fun? Should I have brought film? Let her shoot? She figured out key things about the shutter and aperture, which is huge, but she was more willing to explore and notice than many students because she, as she said “knows what we’re doing.”
Also, at a certain point I said something because I knew it would help her explore her question. Specifically, after she had explored what are the aperture and shutter dial for several minutes, she felt that they were distinct but related. She wasn’t sure how. She kept doing the same thing over and over, and I knew what she was doing and knew that I could help her over the hump if I told her that if she set the dial to B then “it” (she had not used the word shutter, so I didn’t either) would stay open for as long as she kept the button down. This really helped her explore her question, but was it too leading? Furthermore, there were earlier, more fundamental decisions I made to help her explore. I opened the camera for her (maybe I shouldn’t have) because I know that many operations of a camera you call examine unless you look inside (because the inside of a camera is necessarily light-tight. Later, after she had been looking through the front of the lens for several minutes, pressing the shutter release and hearing and seeing what happened, she became confused. She thought that there were 2 related things happening, but could only see one of them. I asked her if she thought she would see something different if she looked through the back. This was a leading question, because I knew that seeing the back would help her identify what was happening, and I had begun to think that she might not think to do it on her own. Should I have?
There is a more fundamental question—would/could she have learned more if I had taught this in a more traditional way? This is a different version of a kind of “first lesson” I do in which I tell kids how the shutter and aperture work and then have them explore it on their own, by playing around with the cameras. It is too early to tell how well Kathryn will retain what she discovered about the shutter and aperture, but I feel like she “got it” in a way that students often don’t. But at the same time, I wonder what would have happened if I had started the lesson the way I did, but was more forthcoming with information. Where is the line? How can you tell what the “right” amount of assistance is?