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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

This is written from the assumptions that digital skills are a primary concern, and that such skills need guidance and leadership to develop.

I think neither of those concerns are valid.

Teaching fundamental skills, especially from a holistic approach (not where math, physics, history, etc. are taught in isolation), is vastly more important. With that foundational knowledge, children can reason and learn more on their own. This is when basic guidance regarding digital skills can be offered.

Once a broad platform of knowledge and ability to think is established, children (and adults) can learn the technical skills easily. If you approach this education in reverse, people learn how to do a few specific things without being able to think independently about what they are doing or why they are doing it. They will certainly have the motivation to learn on their own.

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No, kids dont learn work related bits of technical skills by themselves. They wont learn about file structure, basic maintenance, how to write documents nor how to copy them.

With no guidance and at least hints about what is possible, they are basically how old people used to be - clueless and helpless. They then tend to see themselves as "non-technical" as opposed to "technical" and don't try.

Yeah, I think a lot of people here assume you can "just pick up" those skills, because they themselves did that. But most of HN's userbase are technically inclined to begin with -- they're interested in tech stuff and pick it up relatively easily.

Most people aren't like that, they're not going to pick up tech literacy beyond the level of using a browser/email any more easily than they'd "just pick up" trigonometry on their own.

Very frankly, most people who think they "just picked up" things up did not picked things those things up from nothing. They were in environment that provided enough information and idea about there are things to be picked up from.

That is guidance. And looking at kids now, there is pretty often one kid who is shown basics by parent or video who then show part of those basics to other kids - when it comes to things they are interested in like minecraft. Then they bootstrap, but this is not like the first kid would divine minecraft servers exists. There was that information somewhere.

Same applies to useful skills, except they are less likely to find fun stuff about writing documents or filesystem.

[Caution, pointless reminiscence.]

>Very frankly, most people who think they "just picked up" things up did not picked things those things up from nothing. //

Yeah, not from nothing, but sometimes from not a lot.

I'm middle aged, when I learnt some programming I didn't [knowingly] know anyone who could program. My parents knew how to put the cassette in and load a program; the teachers at school didn't even know how to switch the thing on (or pretended not to?).

The computer came with a manual and from that you could work out how to list programs and try changing them, some example listings were given to type in.

High-school age my mum bought home a computer (orange screen and big turbo button; Win3 I think) as she was volunteer librarian at the school; eventually I found Qbasic on it and it had 3/4 example programs that I gleaned enough from to make a fractal drawing.

I spent quite a lot of time at a command line thinking of things to try writing instead of "win" which loaded up MSWindows - most Basic I knew didn't do anything in DOS to my recollection! All text interfaces should always respond to "help"!!

Wasn't until Uni that I found out there was such a thing as computer science. I mean I'd seen War Games by then and dreamt of having an audio-coupler for several years. I think I thought everyone just used computers if they could; like the guys who programmed spacecraft were just the people who made it.

A little guidance at those early stages would have gone a long way I feel; but I'm sure some managed to grok gorilla.bas, or their equivalent, and bootstrap themselves in to full-on programming.

Anyway, get off my lawn ...

> My parents knew how to put the cassette in and load a program

> The computer came with a manual

> some example listings were given

> my mum bought home a computer

> she was volunteer librarian at the school

> I spent quite a lot of time at a command line thinking

I'm not sure if this is a disconnect: you're calling this "not a lot", but I think it's exactly the "environment" and implicit guidance that the comment above is referring to.

I don't think the reminiscence IS pointless! We can't realistically replicate precisely this for every kid today, but we can look at the things that worked about it (plenty of free time with a powerful, interesting machine?) and try to replicate those.

If I say, my parents new how to put the toast in and press the button: that's "put the cassette in and type the writing on the side of the cassette".

The command line was what you got when you turned the computer on, if you had no idea how to use it you typed words until you typed "work you stupid computer" and it responded "Syntax Error" or "Unknown Command" or something.

>we can look at the things that worked //

It really didn't work. You don't teach people to cook by leaving them in a kitchen until they discover there's a hidden fridge, and a hidden switch for the cooker, and they can cook food rather than eat the prepared food in the fridge, only they haven't found any recipes yet and they're all written in Korean (which I don't know).

Guidance and access to resources is what I needed.

Your not a lot is quite a lot. And even with that, majority of kids won't end up programmers like you did. That is ok, I am pretty sure there were other things you did not learned in moms library and theoretically could.

The school and education is my about that one kid that gets interested by itself.

> spent quite a lot of time at a command line thinking of things to try writing

Majority of kids won't do that, almost no one who has game accessible. I mean, I would not either and at a time I did not even spoke English to be able to guess words.

And remembering back, the students who were behind in basic "how to deal with files" stuff were considered lost cases later on basically. They could be smart, but they would never be taught interesting bits.

I think this is more of a "first world" problem.

Kids in under-resourced learning environments (regardless of whether it's Nigeria or 3rd world countries like most of the USA), need focus on fundamental academics (literacy and math) more than anything else.

Computer literacy beyond browser/email/word-processing reduces down to a "nice-to-have" when actual literacy and learning is in question.

Are you suggesting that if you sat a child down in front of a computer and walked away, they wouldn't eventually know how to do most things?

Children are more likely to try stuff without fear of bad outcomes. It's the adults who need hand-holding. Children will click everything to see what happens.

I know this is probably too old for many readers here, but there was a time when people had VCRs (video cassette players). Most VCRs had a built in digital clock, and many of those VCRs had no backup battery. One little power blip meant the VCR clock would reset to something useless and annoying.

Children or grandchildren would be routinely tasked with setting those clocks, since only they seemed to know how. And almost certainly, those children did not read the manual to learn how to do the unintuitive things with the limited interfaces that would result in setting the clock.

How many children learn the ins and outs of cmd.exe when modern PCs have so many compelling distractions not to mention no printed documentation to give direction?

Naive computer users get locked into local maxima until a need either knocks them into a more complete understanding of how to do things or they just give up. The adults in their social sphere are usually no better equipped to provide guidance.

Is that local maxima bad? In some cases it is, but in other cases it is good enough, now get on with other things in life. The hours I wasted learning edlen back in the day could have been spent learning how to play piano. (my parents didn't have a piano, they had a 8088 computer... Today I have a piano and all of my computers have better editors)

I'm sure that plenty do. I somehow discovered Emacs in the Terminal on the family Mac when I was much younger and I consider that the start of my interest in how computers work under the hood (aside: thanks to the GNU Emacs developers for making the manual so accessible immediately after typing `emacs` into a shell).

The biggest positive influence from my parents and other adults in my life was regulating my video game time but not my "playing with the computer" time. I was pushed towards reading and learning about computer stuff instead of playing games and watching videos.

I'm sure that some kids need more guidance, but in the age of the Internet, the subtle push away from entertainment activities might be enough for many.

I think it's important to remember that many of the people here are exceptional, not typical, computer users. I figured out (mostly on my own, my dad showed me how to get to the prompt itself and that was it) the DOS interface and BASIC (using contents from a math textbook) at age 8. But that's not normal, most of my peers who also had computers available to them figured out video games and that was it.

> Are you suggesting that if you sat a child down in front of a computer and walked away, they wouldn't eventually know how to do most things?

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. And yes, I have the opportunity to watch children and their interactions with technology. And also, the random clicking without fear gets them to locked tablet/computer with things turned off, random files deleted and them being scared cause nothing works suddenly.

Also, I remember VCR and no, the kid was rarely the only one knowing how to set the clock or almost never the one who set the clock first when device came new. Typically someone else set the clock when device was new.

When you put the kid in room with crayons, overwhelming majority wont learn to do art in any reasonable level. If you put them into room with wood and knife, overwhelming majority wont discover woodworking techniques.

> them being scared cause nothing works suddenly. //

This "oh crap, I've bust it" moment is the precursor to learning!

Tech tends to be too locked down nowadays, so those moments become fewer - you have to manufacture them.

> This "oh crap, I've bust it" moment is the precursor to learning!

Unless of course you end up with device you can't use and then go do something elsw. It is just not true that kids would universally figured it on their own, especially when the issue is deep in settings.

Frankly, people here imagine idealised version of themselves and then expect it to be norm. That would be like artist imagining that all the kids love drawing and high quality crayons are all they need and then being shocked that most of them just can't do it.

And double so kids for who computer is something expensive for work and not a toy. So if they broke it parent is locked out of work till they find someone who will fix it and the kid won't get access again.

And tripple so kids who are not English native speakers and don't understand words on screens.

As far as I know, the obvious difference comes down to depravation.

If you have a computer that does all sorts of important things, like work, or even playing games, then exploring how it works isn't the obvious first thing that comes to mind for interacting with it.

But if you have a computer that doesn't really have any use-cases that you personally care about, exploring how it works is pretty much the only thing you there is to do, when playing around with it.

Similarly, if you break your computer while exploring it, and you have plenty of other things to do, then you'll maybe give up on your explorations.

But if you break your computer and you have nothing else to play with, you'll see the breakage as an obstacle in the way of your continued entertainment—sort of like you might see the Internet being down—and try to figure out how to get it back up and working again. You might not succeed, but it's the attempt to get it working that builds the "engineering mindset", not the success per se.

I'm a programmer today mostly because: my parents weren't always around to bug; I didn't live near-enough to friends to always have them over or visit them; and I didn't own any video games, but merely rented them (mostly timed to when said friends came over.) Then, when I was 9-or-so, my family got a computer that ran Windows 98, had no Internet connection, and had no games installed. I "played" with it by poking around in MS Paint and discovering the hidden sets of system MIDI files; but also by doing weird things like making "Briefcases" just to see what they did; or creating desktop shortcuts to nothing-in-particular just so I could put some of the "cool" icons from pifmgr.dll on my desktop, as if I was collecting game power-ups.

You're assuming that they have time and resources for even relatively unrestricted exploration. Judging from the article, that probably isn't the case for most of these children.

there was a TED talk about children in rural areas teaching themselves how to use a computer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRb7_ffl2D0

I agree guidance is needed. However it is much easier to guide someone if they have other basic skills. If you don't know basic logic you will do exactly the maintenance activity I teach you without noticing that some other part is broke. If you can't read you can push buttons in the right order but if you make a mistake you won't be able to understand the error message.

Once you have basics which don't need digital stuff I can teach you more quickly, but it will be specialized to areas I know deep : I hope it is useful for you. Don't ask me to teach you medicine, I know my first aid but that is just enough to get someone to a doctor who takes over doing things I don't know how to do or teach.

I picked doctor above because I can guarantee that any target group of humans will find it useful to have a few people to spealize in it. Computers are great, but it isn't necessary to have as a specialist in every village.

> No, kids don't learn work related bits of technical skills by themselves. They wont learn about file structure, basic maintenance, how to write documents nor how to copy them.

Yes, actually, they can.

"file structure" and other unimportant minutia are minor obstacles which can be picked up as needed when the child has a need to understand it. Specifically, "file structure" is rapidly becoming a meaningless implementation detail from the point of view of computer users-- if you use MacOS for example.

The important thing for a solid education is a focus on fundamentals. Everything else is secondary.

There was a TED talk about exactly this topic in 2007... https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_kids_can_teach_themse... see also.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugata_Mitra

No, because at the time they "need that" first time, they suddenly need a lot new things simultaneously. Then there is not progression. And they get owerwhelmed, frustrated and conclude that "I am not technical person" or some such.

Like, I have contact with kids. I do see them interact with things.

I think digital skills are as important as the three Rs of traditional education (Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic), and deserve as much attention. TBC, IMHO "digital skills" encompass far more than learning about files/folders and using a word processor, and are probably worth unpacking over a decade of education, much like the other three topics. (though it is early enough to crystallize into a definite formal curriculum -- which makes it difficult to integrate into the current school system)

As people's lives come to be dominated by computing/algorithmic/automation technology, people need to be able to make sense of the world in order to be able to function as intelligent beings with autonomy/agency. Otherwise they will be fundamentally dependent on the feudal lords who control their information+computing experience. Market forces will create apps/services that will cater to certain profitable use-cases, but that is far from sufficient.

Over the last decade, we're seeing adults continue to fail miserably at this -- which indicates that their level of preparation is woefully inadequate. As a concrete example, it is difficult to understand how stupid a computer is (even massively-hyped AI models) till you try to implement a statistical reasoning model and see it stumble repeatedly in an apparently "simple", "common-sense" use case. Once you've gone through that exercise, you will never take the AI-hype or automated ranking/rating/etc at face value. Enough foundational knowledge to tell apart snake-oil salesmen (eg: predicting criminal recidivism from mugshots) is absolutely crucial as these things become ubiquitous and form a Kafkaesque network that determines the quality of people's lives (online shopping, online news/info, social media, credit rating, job-eligibility filtering, smart contracts, digital currency, etc.). Heck, most people currently cannot grok the security-vs-recoverability tradeoff of fully-encrypted information on their phones!

For the literate age, we decided that reading & writing would be foundational skills for almost all human experience. If the computing revolution is as important as the print revolution, we must give as much importance to "digital skills".

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