The Missing Computer Skills of High School Students

163 点作者 OberstKrueger超过 6 年前

32 条评论

jcfrei超过 6 年前

Files, directories and paths are such a fundamental concept, yet I am surprised how few computer users are actually familiar with them. To me it seems that most computer classes at the high school level can be divided in two groups: One which is basically a class for typists, where you learn how to type fast and how to edit documents. And then another one which directly (and often exclusively) teaches coding.However what's often missing is a class which teaches basic computing concepts. Files and directories are just some of them. The basic von Neumann architecture (a CPU changing ram), what a program is, how the internet protocol and the domain name system work, different parts of a URL, how a frame buffer determines what is shown on the screen, how colors are encoded with RGB values, etc. These are all very interesting concepts that could be taught at the high school level. There's a lot to be learned even without going into the technical details and I am confident that these students would then find (desktop) computers much more accessible. Smartphones and their touch interfaces have been a runaway success and I think this is in part because most people never got comfortable with traditional desktop computers (and their GUIs) due to decades of misguided computer classes.

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Adaptive超过 6 年前

I work at a girls middle school and taught a class called "technology literacy" last year to 6th graders.I covered what I felt were basics:* Basic communications tools (email)* Word processing/Spreadsheets/Presentation software via g suite* Basic command line usage including bash basics, paths, file creation and edition, sshing* Basic HTML and "how the internet works" (also with CLI editing of html files in user directories)* touch typing (typingclub.com)These girls as seventh graders are coding in Python and nailing it.

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sfRattan超过 6 年前

I have a distinct memory of 8th grade typing class: once a week over the whole fall semester we practiced typing on these awful AlphaSmart devices. Made almost no progress in our words-per-minute. Then, over Christmas break, we all started using AIM to message each other. Spring semester began and our teacher was flummoxed... We had all jumped up by 20-30 words per minute from where we had been on the first day back in class.

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vinceguidry超过 6 年前

His main complaint seems to be that he couldn't teach kids how to interact with a file system. I don't think the concept of a file system is an easy one to grasp. And it's not something we should be expecting schools to teach.I once had the privilege of doing the converse, teaching an 80 year old woman the same concepts. I had exactly the same problems he described. These things are not simple nor intuitive, nor are they really needed for basic usage of a computer.I taught them to her because that was what my formative years using computers was like, and because that is how you understand what's going on under the hood. But I had to quickly roll back my ambitions to non-CLI interfaces because she just didn't have the same kind of time I had when I was 13 to just spend hours and hours figuring it all out.It's not necessary to learn how to touch type, and it's not necessary to learn the file system concepts used by the userland. You can do amazing work with a computer without that knowledge.Pedagogy doesn't just involve knowing how to teach, but also in knowing what needs to be taught. You don't need to dive into the intimate details of radiocarbon dating to get kids excited about dinosaurs.

skywhopper超过 6 年前

I'm not surprised at all about the pathing things. I doubt there's any cohort in the last forty years who commonly had knowledge of "." and "..", though.But the typing thing is disturbing to me. There's lots of hand-wringing over whether or not to make students learn cursive, but my daughter was expected to write timed essays on computers (in tiny web textareas, even!) without ever being given even basic typing instruction. She's a junior in high school now, but never once in all her years of being in classrooms with computers, doing computer labs, doing online standardized tests, and being required to submit papers in electronic format, has there been any opportunity, much less a requirement, to learn to type.Somehow, miraculously, she's a prolific writer (of fan fiction, original fiction, and humor articles for her school newspaper--along with multiple completions of NaNoWriMo, which she's gearing up for again this year), but she still types half by sight and almost all with her first two or three fingers.I realize this can work fine, but nothing helped my own computer usage more than being forced to muddle through a typing class in high school. I'm agog we don't invest in such a basic skill in our schools.

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jtnews超过 6 年前

"Instead it’s rote learning some particular IDE without real understanding."The reason for this is that very few of the people doing the teaching of computing concepts in high school understand themselves and all they can do is follow the script in the textbook. Teaching degrees focus more on the concept of teaching than the content of teaching. I have first hand seen teachers with years of experience "teaching Word" get lost and come to a full stop the second something doesn't line up exactly with the book.Using a computer does not translate into understanding a computer. I know very intelligent teachers, some with advanced degrees (Master's and Doctorate's), that have trouble navigating to a website that doesn't start with www and are unable to distinguish between a url and an email address. All of the letters and symbols (real strange ones like :, /, ., or @) might as well be part of a magical incantation that teleports words, pictures, and videos to their screens.

ux-app超过 6 年前

I'm a high school IT teacher, and can definitely relate to the lack of knowledge of the file system. It's particularly bad with students using a mac. We're now seeing a 50/50 split between win/mac and it seems that most kids are getting macs because that's the current fashion, but they really struggle with basic file ops. About 90% (no exaggeration) of mac students simply never discover the little down arrow that expands the file save dialog. This leads to students simply hitting save and having all their files dumped on the desktop. Then they minimize their app and move the recently saved file into another folder (usually also on desktop). Of course, in the case of a save as, this leads to a 'file deleted' message when they return to their program. Thus was a particular issue when I was teaching web dev and using vscode.I try to teach file management in context where it makes sense. Web dev is a good topic to focus on it. Creating a folder to hold a site, sub folders for css,js,imgs and then relative file paths in html and css. These concepts are a first for many middle schoolers.On the other hand kids are great at using virtual desktops on mac, whereas only maybe 2% of win users have discovered/use virtual desktops.

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snazz超过 6 年前

> In the future, kids will be less and less exposed to keyboards, and productive computing in general.I'll go out on a limb here and say that this isn't a new thing at all. It's just that, in the past, fewer students had access to computers, and those who did generally understood them better. Now, it's not that the average high school student doesn't have access, but that the vast majority don't have any interest in how the machine works. It's the same percentage of the total who are interested and good at computing but it's just that a much lower percentage of the computer users are good computer users, in my experience.High school "computer science" classes in my area seem to teach "you always need to type public static void main(String[] args) for your program to work", as opposed to teaching students what that means. As with in the past, the students who are really good at computing do most of their learning outside of school.

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MayeulC超过 6 年前

This is true in my experience. Even a (materials science) PhD student I'm working with told me he is so "bad with computers" that when someone asked him to open a specific directory, he answered "what is a directory?".I can only imagine it being much worse for the general population, and this makes me wish I could teach in high schools, even if just a bit. Unfortunately, part-time teachers, or teachers that just come for the odd conference/course on a specific topic seem to mostly be a uni thing, at least where I live.I was just thinking about this the other day: kids should probably get more exposure to cryptography, maybe even before high school, for the following reasons: - kids love secret messages - crypto math is quite basic algebra - even without the maths, asymmetric crypto and hashes are quite easy to grasp - maybe it will allow them to better understand security as adultsI would love to see a future where public/private keys can be used as a general authentication mean, without it needing to be too dumbed down, as we can expect people to know the basics. It would also likely lower phishing issues.I agree that schools are to blame here, even when they try to broaden the scope of their teachings. But I would give teachers some slack, as they were likely not prepared at all on some topics. So, maybe the solution here is indeed to ask parents to come and teach students some bits of their speciality? It could be done in multiple domains, and I feel like this would be a lot better for kids to be able to relate and project the content their are taught onto a person's job.

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walrus01超过 6 年前

The increasing use of walled garden things like iOS which abstract the file system away from the end user, making it impossible to know what the system's actual directory structure looks like, certainly doesn't help."where is your data?""uhhh, it's in the app, or in the cloud""yes, but specifically where?""i dunno"The comment here nails it: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350671" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350671</a>Children and teenagers these days spend a lot of time using passive media consumption devices. An iPad is great if you're watching youtube or netflix passively, not so great at all if you want to create your own content, edit it, manipulate it, back it up, transfer it places, etc. Touchscreen devices and phones are great for browsing web pages. It's a media portal with a walled garden app store, not a real computer, though its hardware may be capable of more than its operating system allows it to do.This comment could easily devolve into a "get off my lawn" rant, but I seriously believe that people who learned how to use x86 type computers from a command line first are much more capable of understanding what's going on underneath a GUI. If you spent time mucking about with config.sys and autoexec.bat settings in MS-DOS 3.3 and 5.0, a long time before you saw a Windows GUI, you could immediately grok what was going on when you did install Windows.I am not a big fan of Arch Linux, but in the modern era there's a lot of value to getting people to learn what is going on when they do a brand new Arch install on an empty disk. What's happening with fdisk, partitioning, formatting, grub2/bootloader, etc. And why it's happening. If you don't want to go that far in an educational environment, start people from a debian stretch barebones install with CLI only + sshd.

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systematical超过 6 年前

Are you telling me kids don't click around the C drive anymore and all those "weird" folders in Windows just to see whats there? That's probably one of the first things I did when I got a computer (Windows 95), including deleting random files just to see what happened.

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Aelius超过 6 年前

I am wary of making predictive generalizations, but I have been thinking about the effect of "just works" computers for roughly ten years. The robotics program in my highschool folded after I left, in part because no one was left who could write the programming. Watching my nephew grow up on iPads and iPhones: I learned how to use computers by breaking them, and then fixing them. iOS doesn't let you screw it up, and there are too many addicting games to suck up all his time anyway. I'm considering teaching him some things now and giving him a cheap laptop or rPi, but I doubt he'd choose to use that over the silly endless games on iOS, or the bottomless pit that is YouTube.

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japhyr超过 6 年前

> I lay most of the blame on the schools.I'm a high school teacher, and I've been in this world for a long time. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the issue of pay yet. The median pay for teachers in the US is around $50k. Starting salaries are under $40k. Max pay is around $70-$90k, but it takes 10-15 years to get there, and in many states the max pay isn't this high.If you're a good high school CS teacher, you can basically walk out the door and get a job that will double your salary. How many of you have been in a field where your pay absolutely does not depend on the quality of your work? I am leaving the classroom after this year, to focus more on technical work. It feels entirely different to be heading into work where the better my performance is, the more I'll get paid.I've been teaching for 24 years, so I'm not leaving just for pay reasons. But I don't think we can look at solutions to better HS CS education without addressing the issue of teacher pay. If I were graduating college today with the skills I had 20 years ago, I'm not sure I'd go into the classroom.

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Mistri超过 6 年前

I'm a senior in high school and some of this is relevant to me. I'm a self-taught programmer since the beginning of high-school (although I was pretty bad at the time, and still am), but after just a few weeks of playing around with arbitrary code, I was able to pick up the filesystem pretty easily. I took AP Computer Science last year and the basics of the filesystem were briefly taught in class, however not very in-depth and most of my classmates still don't understand it to this day.As for typing, I'm a touch typer and have been since around 5th grade. When we started using computers at school (a new phenomenon, I know) everyone had to be able to type fast. In first grade we also had to learn how to type in the "computer lab" and for homework on our home computers, which I'm very grateful for now. I can type at around ~119 WPM now.

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thrower123超过 6 年前

I don't think this was any different ten or fifteen years ago when I was in high school.We even had actual keyboarding classes and Mavis Beacon and everything, and I wasn't able to consistently touch type until about a year and a half into my first job as a software engineer. This was coincidentally about when I started using IBM-layout mechanical keyboards almost exclusively; I'm still regularly thrown for a loop when I switch to keyboards with other layouts, so I probably am still not actually touch typing properly, I just have built up enough muscle memory that I get by on the particular hardware I spend 8-12 hours a day hammering.As far as pathing goes, and specifically the use of the particular convention we have around . and .. meaning present directory and parent directory, I'm not sure I was even exposed to that until I took a C/Unix programming course in college and had to get used to navigating a Linux file system in a terminal. The first computer I ever had started out with some type of Curses-style DOS shell that abstracted most of the nitty gritty details, and from there went to Windows 95->98->XP->Vista->7. As a regular PC user on Windows, you don't deal with the command prompt, you deal with the file explorer and the save/open file dialogs. When I started programming in high school, it was QBasic, then VB6, then basic C++ with Visual C++ 6 and Bloodshed, then Java working out of an IDE (JCreator or Netbeans?), and again, pathing was not particularly emphasized. Building out student-level projects, I think I just dumped whatever files I needed in the cwd, or in paths under that tree, or popped open file picker GUIs.You really have to live and breathe this stuff day in and day out for a while to internalize it, and I wouldn't say I was really comfortable until maybe a year or so into being a "professional" programmer.

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yardie超过 6 年前

I can agree with almost everything the OP states except the dig at tablets. My first PC in university didn’t use local storage. So I get cloud computing. At the end of the day it’s all just NFS storage and chrooted apps. You don’t need a PC or laptop for that.

epberry超过 6 年前

File systems suck anyway. They’re useful for programmers and software but pretty awful for people organizing data. My exclusive approach for finding things these days is Spotlight on Mac or google drive search. Drive search is so good that it’s not even necessary to name documents correctly or put the right content in them. Sometimes it seems like the search is context aware and you can type ideas into the search bar and get a list of documents that might be relevant to them. I think of my document memory more as a hashmap than a tree and typing in part of the file and going straight to it is extremely satisfying.

paavoova超过 6 年前

Fundamentally, abstraction fosters illiteracy. You have an entire generation or two of people who grew or are growing up solely on touch devices, and many of these devices expose no native filesystem (e.g. iOS) to its users. And as the article says, these devices are used largely for consumption (media, social extensions), all by design. You now have to go out of your way to learn even the basic, trivial fundamentals, but kids handed a smartphone at age 9 may very well have no desire to do so.Of course, and to use an analogy, not everyone has the time or motivation nor even reason to become an auto mechanic. But something like transportation has always been a means to an end. The difference with consumer technology now is that nearly everyone fancies themselves a "tech" enthusiast in one form or another thanks to proximity and thus familiarity. But at the same time, many (perhaps most) remain underexposed to the very technology they use as a lifeline. There's a pervasive "just works" mentality that has influenced everything, partially spearheaded by tech companies like Apple circa Steve Jobs. This wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for people spending so many hours of their own spare time using technology, but simultaneously learning nothing. The equivalent time spend in a traditional computing environment would teach the fundamentals whether one is interested or not, simply through exposure. But there's little such exposure in modern personal computing.

trey-jones超过 6 年前

I mostly speak from my own experience growing up (90s). Briefly, this was Apple II in middle school learning BASIC for 6 weeks, Windows 95 in High School, XP in college (Liberal Arts). I didn't start writing code until I was about 25, and was 28 when I started in tech.I can understand that it's possible kids don't know about paths, since most modern operating systems abstract this from the users, but I wonder if it has as much or more to do with never having been exposed to Linux. That was certainly my situation.One of the first pieces of advice I read when I started teaching myself to write code was "So you want to be a hacker? Ditch Windows and use Linux full time." I realize there are lots of good Windows programmers out there - not trying to bash anyone - but for the programmer on a budget I think this is the correct path. I will also admit that I haven't used a Linux GUI in many years and I suspect that one could get by without understanding paths using a recent version of Ubuntu. One of the reasons I suspect this is that I have had my parents using Ubuntu since 2011 or so.Nevertheless, many basic linux concepts were foreign to me when I started using it. Ever since, I've definitely thought Linux computers in schools rather than Windows would be a good idea. Linux computers without a GUI at all might be even better (at least for teaching computer classes), but I guess you might have difficulty holding their attention.

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codemusings超过 6 年前

I think what's worth noting is that users in general are less and less exposed to the concept of files and directories. Let's face it. The computer most students use are their smartphones. Everything is sandboxed. You never ever select a file path. It's more about context than location.

scotty79超过 6 年前

I code for more than two decades and I never learned to touch type. I tried for a bit but it didn't stick. I can't type in complete darkness but if I can see with the corner of my eye where the keyboard is I'm just hitting the keys.Touch typing for coding felt awkward because there's a lot of special symbols that are kind of hard and unintuitive to make if you try to touch same keys all the time. Also I wiggle in my chair quite a bit and believe it's essential for healthy sitting. I feel like touch typing could interfere with my wiggling.My style of typing is yet another factor why I get infuriated when I sit in front of a Macbook. For some reason Mac keyboard is about 3/4 of the key to the side of where I expect it to be (and literally every other keyboard is exactly where I expect).

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jccalhoun超过 6 年前

I teach college and the problem is much more fundamental than that. Certainly I have tech literate students but I can't tell you how often I see students struggle to just log onto their email when they try to pull up a class presentation.The old cliche is searching for google is not only alive and well but now it is search for google, go to google, then search for youtube, then search for the video you want to show.Even when they actually have the url for a video, in the last several years since I have started paying attention I don't think I have ever seen a student use the "paste and go" option in the right click menu. They ALWAY paste it in then hit enter. Paste and go is right under paste!When I post a link to a survey or something I want them to go to I have stopped just copying and pasting the url. I now have to paste it in and make sure to delete <a href="http://www" rel="nofollow">http://www</a> because nearly all of them will type it in and a large percentage will do it wrong.showing them ctrl+f to find something on a page blows their mind.I have started teaching some sections of public speaking online and I was driven crazy by the complete tech illiteracy of some of the "digital natives." (pro tip: emailing and saying "it doesn't work" is not useful.)I try to keep the xkcd comic about being excited when I get to show someone something new but it is hard.

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_ph_超过 6 年前

Touch typing is one of the most underappreciated skills for tech workers. Few of my colleagues are true touch typists. So yes, you can survive without touch typing. But it is one of those skills, where a few weeks up to months of thorough practise early one give you a life-long benefit, as you save valuable work time and screen attention with every single word you type. As a touch typist you can not only type faster, but also can concentrate more on what you are typing as your attention never leaves the screen and the typing itself doesn't require any concious typing effort any more.

vezycash超过 6 年前

Not understanding paths isn't alarming they just haven't had a need for it yet.Teach em how to copy, delete, move, rename stuff via CMD and they'll get it fast!Make them use cmd exclusively for playing music, opening games, deleting stuff... And the concept of Path, directory and files will simply click. Besides they'll have something cool to show off to their friendsIf I only use explorer, I don't need to know . and ..However, if I do lots of file operations via CMD, then I'll get tired of using cd\ all the time when I only want to go up one level.

bitwize超过 6 年前

As it turns out, understanding hierarchical directories is really, really hard for most people, which is why iOS eschews them entirely, at least as far as the UI is concerned.According to Jaron Lanier, the concept of a "file" is an accidental one in the history of computing, not an essential one. If we want computing to truly be available to the masses, maybe it's time we leave things like files and folders behind, and not allow the dead weight of the past to hold us back now.

maceurt超过 6 年前

The touch typing part is not true, at least from my experience. Almost every kid I know in my school can type at least 30wpm touch typing. In fact, we had 2 required typing classes in middle school that both were a semester long. This is not even a rich private school thing either this is a public high school that is composed of mostly kids from lower income families.

Axsuul超过 6 年前

The keyboard on mobile devices has the same layout as the computer's so shouldn't that translate somewhat to touch typing? At least they should have an advantage over those who never grew up with technology.High school students still talk to their friends via iMessage or Facebook Messenger so they have plenty of exposure to this interface.

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thewizardofaus超过 6 年前

Really interesting that touch typing is a skill lacking!Maybe it was growing up on age of empires that improved my typing.At age 8 I typed 32wpm At age 12 I typed 120wpmTyping speed never really improved beyond that, occasionally hit bursts of 140+wpm but eh. Regular qwerty non mechanical keyboard.

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Sophistifunk超过 6 年前

Unpopular opinion: Relative paths (paths in general, really) are a terrible thing, and it's excellent that people are able to get by without that knowledge.

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catchmeifyoucan超过 6 年前

Agreed. New schools give ipads to students in lieu of laptops. I think typing is very important, and schools should continue teaching typing as a skill.

justifier超过 6 年前

i advocate for computer education being complementarily folded into the current math curriculumi have interest in changing the math curriculum as well, but for people who like the current math curriculum I think there are enormous benefits of teaching computer skills.. science.. through implementation

hrshlb超过 6 年前

typing.com is a great place to learn touch typing. I reached ~35wpm in less than 3 weeks.