Kids can't use computers and this is why it should worry you (2013)
coding2learn.org
coding2learn.org
There's also a general aversion to anything that looks like logic or systems thinking, but that's a much older problem in education. Mathematics is, for most pupils, just a set of increasingly arcane rituals done with symbols on paper. The connection to the arithmetic of everyday life is tenuous at best.
People love LLMs because they can talk to them just like a person, and the LLM will talk back just like a person. The fact that the LLM is a bullshit artist that doesn't know what it's talking about isn't just inconsequential; it's a bonus, because it makes it even more lifelike.
In Comments: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.speaking computer is precise. speaking human language is rich.
But we still need to know how to use computers, even Scotty got down to a keyboard when needed.
Surely this is a wild exaggeration?
If you said "CLI" I would believe it... But they would have had to download/upload a file to apply to the university, create a resume, post a meme to reddit, move pictures from their phone to their computer, etc.
Not sure about the others, but most are about consuming memes(or searching for a gif to post), the typical poster to viewer percentage is only about 1% to 2% on places like Reddit.
Also, why would they move pictures from their phone to their computer(assuming they even have a personal PC and not a school issued Chromebook)? They do everything they need to with the image on the phone.
Switch "post a meme" to "download a meme", or whatever. My point is that they have very obviously interacted with, moved, copied, and deleted files.
Professionally I’ve been in charge of interviewing foreign candidates from those headhunter type programs. I’ve legitimately interviewed people who claimed years and years of experience but had no measurable computer experience.
My high school aged family has next to no idea how to do anything on a computer but use a browser.
I would have thought so, too. Until just yesterday.
Someone from a department in my company e-mailed me a Word document with a picture of a PDF icon in it. She thought that would send the PDF document to me.
At first I thought it was the 1990's again when secretaries were first getting computers, and would do things like hold a piece of paper up to the computer screen in order to "scan" it in.
So I looked up her profile in the company intranet. She's 30. Then I remembered what I'd read so often here on HN: That young people grew up with phones and tablets and the whole "desktop" paradigm is foreign to them.
Well, those people are growing up and landing real jobs now. And so now I guess the burden of teaching basic computer literacy falls on the companies again, just like it did in the 1990's.
To be clear, in my class it's a small fraction who struggle like this, but it's real.
Like, imagine using an iPad your entire childhood, and then maybe getting a Chromebook. You just aren't going to have the same level of comfort with what files are or how they might work, as you don't really ever think in their terms.
Do you need to actually "download a file" to apply to a University, or is it a captive web form now? If you do, imagine doing it on an iPad: you download the file and it goes into some transient Downloads UI before getting opened directly by your word processor. Certainly creating a resume doesn't cause much interaction with "files".
You certainly don't, anymore, use files to move pictures from your phone to your computer: you use a cloud service like iCloud Photos or Google Photos, which automatically "syncs" all of your data from your phone to the same app on your desktop.
If you want to create a meme on reddit--which you certainly are doing on your phone or iPad, as a computer is complicated and lame--you aren't using generic tools to edit files you saved to disk: the closets thing to a filesystem you are working with is your camera roll, working in an app that let's you add remix from it and then saves the result back to it.
People at companies like Apple have gone to such great lengths to hide the complexity--and limit the ways of composition--of software that, at best, "Files" is just a sort of confusing app you might sometimes get forced to use only if you have no other reasonable option, and so you don't have a mental model for it; and even then, it's separate from where your data "really is".
They also do it in confusing, inconsistent, and self-serving ways. What does it mean to "save data" like an image or a document? In Google Photos, it means you associate a copy of it with your Google account. In MS Office by default, it means you stick it in OneDrive.
Everyone wants the "happy path" of data storage and retrieval to lead directly to their own proprietary systems with their own proprietary implementations of basic file-like operations. No one wants the default to be the tried-and-true method of local files and folders.
Which one would a corporation pick to maximize its profits?
(Playing devil's advocate, it is easier to support backup and restore via the cloud, vs. having end-users corrupt/lose their files, then clamor for end-user support)
In my kid's mind (and in the mind of her peers in middle school), if you have to open up the Files app to solve a problem, or Windows Explorer, that's seen as dark wizardry that only hardcore computer fixers do. Kind of like how the command line was thought of 20 years ago: Only sorcerers use the command line! Well, now, only sorcerers browse their hard drive for files.
> Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work.
Even reading this back when it was published, it came across as drivel. Now, we have doomscroll-optimized short-form video which does precisely what Prensky recommended, and nobody in their right minds would suggest that it is healthy/good/beneficial for kids to consume that kind of media.
I wouldn’t quite say they didn’t know what files were, but they had a lot of trouble with the ideas like: you need to point your IDE at the file you want to edit (so, if you save-as in various locations, only the last one will actually reflect your last round of changes).
VSCode can also read from files which are inside a zip, but can’t write to them, which… seems obvious but I 100% get why somebody who is seeing zipped files for the first time would find it confusing.
I wouldn’t say it was as straightforward as the story of “hopeless engineering students” would have you believe, but there were some puzzles. Most of them knew enough to get into weird situations, which got me lots of headaches… but, breaking your computer is the first step to learning how it works, so shrug.
I’m not very familiar with the details of the zip format, just uncompressed/compress when I need to modify a zip. But, if you want to modify a file inside a zip, there will be some bookkeeping, right? I guess it would at least be necessary to make sure the modified file doesn’t start to overlap the entry after it…
It is not a insurmountable hurdle, but it is interesting in the sense that things like git, programming, etc, all deal with files and filesystem hierarchies, and the students have never seen this, so it makes it one more thing to add to the (ever growing) list of things they need to know before we jump in.
I taught some cybersec classes maybe 4-5 years ago and while students definitely struggled with some (what I would consider) "basic" stuff like CLI, variables, loops, etc... no one had an issue with directions like "copy this file to here", "extract the files to there", "set up this directory and point this tool to it", stuff like that.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/auu67x/p...
If that's true, it's a massive change.
To me this is a thing, I wonder how may kids out there hack their Computers if they even have one.
In spite of AI, I expect a huge shortage of real programmers in 10 years or so and the teenagers of the 90s start retiring.
All I achieved was to convince them that computers are hard and stupid and not fun, and that iPads and Playstation are superior in every way.
Fast forward a decade and I end up being a programmer. Most people won’t learn technical things just for the hell of it.
maybe you are pushing them to do things with computers too early and you would have more success if you focused more on trying to capture their wonder.
Since the early 1990s, pre-packaged games and social media have delivered more dopamine faster. It's changed children and teenagers, but it's changing them in a different way than BASIC changed their parents.
My son has found his way to it from watching youtube videos on history of computer viruses. I think it's the path from Minecraft, Minecraft hacks, Minecraft mods....
He recently asked me if we could install windows xp on virtual box like one of the youtuber he watches did. So we set that up. He has been watching youtube about secret features, testing them out and found out what happens when you delete random file in system32. He doesn't get why none of his friends understand anything he says to them about this stuff. In his mind he wonder why aren't they all watching this stuff? I had to explain he's got some pretty niche hobbies even by my standards.
I'd expand on that and say that we're forcing computers onto people who don't understand them in the first place, which aligns with what you're saying.
The same number of people are interested in tech/computers and want to have a deeper understanding, but because tech has become so required, we're seeing people who are only going to do the bare minimum.
Interesting idea.
"Back in my day you had to solve dense differential equations to design a circuit to get a filtered output on a amplifier! And then you had to manually build it! Nowadays these kids just use libraries and pass it variables to get the output they want!"
I don't think technical competence goes away, it just changes form from what you recognize as technical competence.
If you don't know what a manila folder is, the icon means nothing to you and you have to learn it as an abstract entity. That is fine, but it slows down learning rate.
When I was young, the computer in the back room was monolithic and offered an infinite amount of interaction compared to all the other devices I owned, and it was natural that I'd find myself returning to it over and over again. But with the abundance of screens and connectivity in today's world, that sheer wonder & curiosity would probably be lessened for today's children.
The family PC as an institution was key as well. A broad sandbox for children to mess around in and gain an idea as to how things worked from an early age, and the cost of it [usually] being the only PC in the house meant that adults had to seriously learn how to set up & maintain it as well as teach us how to use it. But this was supplanted and atomised by cheaper laptops when Vista rolled around, then rendered non-existent in the era of smartphones.
> There are always one or two kids in every cohort that have already picked up programming or web development or can strip a computer down to the bare bones
I feel like of all things, this is mostly nurtured by PC gaming. You naturally learn about tweaking settings, installation locations, hardware, config files, troubleshooting issues, and if you're creative or have an apt for programming then you can find yourself making your own game mods. I've heard from Gen Z friends how they got their start learning to port forward so they could run a Minecraft server with their mates!
I wish this would still work. Today's kids would instantly use AI to solve it.
Does anyone have an idea for a challenge that will instill some level of technical literacy without being instantly gameable in the era of omnipresent LLMs?
Out of the 5 answers it gave, those ones seemed interesting :
>The Hardware Whisperer (Requires Simple Hardware): >Setup: Requires a cheap microcontroller like a Raspberry Pi Pico or an ESP32/ESP8266, plus maybe an LED or a button. >Task: "Make the LED blink out 'SOS' in Morse code when you press the button." Or: "Read the value from this simple sensor (e.g., temperature) and print it to the serial monitor only if it's above a certain threshold." >Why it works: LLMs can generate MicroPython or Arduino C++ code easily. However, the user must deal with the physical wiring, installing drivers/firmware tools, uploading the code, and debugging why it's not working (Is the code wrong? Is the wiring loose? Is the board getting power?). This physical interaction layer is opaque to the LLM.
>Setup: Create a very simple text-based game (e.g., navigate a maze, guess a number with clues, a basic simulation) that runs locally. The game's state changes with each command. >Task: "Reach the end of the maze / Win the game." The rules might not be fully explained, requiring experimentation. >Why it works: The LLM can't play the game directly because it doesn't have access to the running process or its internal state. The user must interact with it, observe the output, and decide on the next input. They might use an LLM to suggest strategies or even write a script to automate playing the game (if the interaction pattern is simple enough), which itself teaches valuable skills.
Within 2 days he had it ruined. Kept running hot and crashing. I told him over the phone how to analyze the problem. Nothing what I said made any sense to him.
So I came over and saw that he had installed 50 or so new programs, some very dubious. Zero security awareness, just click on anything like a grandma. One program was rogue and took 100% CPU in a forever loop. He had never heard of task manager to inspect such a problem. Completely clueless on how to use a PC or operating system.
He also has a sister. I asked her to share a document. She opens the document on the laptop and proceeds to make photos of the doc with her phone and sends them to me.
These are middle-class young adults with decent education (in theory). It's shocking.
Requires no signup, no logins, no malware risk, no paid subscription, no special software, no special hardware.
What were you expecting her to do?
Also: a computer (where the documents were) has the required hardware and software to send the documents as is. Your phone is the special and external hardware in this case, not the computer (also probably more expensive than the computer). Your phone requires signups and logins as much or even more than computers. I don’t know what paid subscription you would need to share these documents. Plenty of free methods. I don’t know why you are talking about malware? Do you think the documents might mutate into malware while traveling the internet? I think the risk exists with pictures too, be careful out there!
All major phone OS now have the ability to select and copy text out of images.
If you think about it she really did choose the best method to transfer a text document safely, securely, efficiently.
HN thread last time this was posted (12-ish years ago)
things are worse now, I presume.
It's been an interesting, um, pedagogical experiment.
In my kid's friend group (now 7th grade), the usage is all over the map. Some kids write C++ code or do Tinkercad. Others watch YouTube from 8am to the closing bell, during class and lunch. Still more spend their lesson time on Minecraft Educational edition.
(YouTube is a bit of a loophole... Since some teachers use it for lesson material, the school's WiFi leaves it unblocked. So YouTube Shorts stands in for IG Reels and TikTok, which are blocked.)
Ugh, my daughter does this, and it's infuriating. How are you supposed to make any progress if you don't read what's wrong with it? I think as programmers, we should recognize that our programs which are already inundating users with unnecessary pop-ups and notifications, are training them to just dismiss every message from the computer. Any time your PM says "I know, we need to tell the user this, so pop up a message..." don't do it!
"What's a computer?"
The more and more modern desktop OSs evolve, the less of that is required. I want to open a file? I search for it using Win key / Spotlight - I just need to know the name or content.
The day will come when LLMs come integrated with your desktop OS and abstract away even more of the screen elements and interactions...
"Reinstall Windows" is even worse than "just drop in a new engine". You're going to lose all the memories of the roads you drive on daily in the process. Good luck kid.
Kids need to be educated better about these things but it takes tremendous amounts of time and patience (that a lot of parents simply can't find) to properly train kids in this way. People like the author and myself did that to ourselves, out of our own curiousity and more importantly, intrinsic motivation.
It's simply completely pointless to expect every person to use a tool as ubiquitous as a computer or a car to be this deeply invested and interested in the operation. If we manage to get all users to be able to swap a tire we would already have come a long long way.
To be entirely fair, we have this exact same problem with cars. The sheer number of people who do not understand they need to change oil, rotate tires, and swap wiper blades is also too high. Even being able to change a tire yourself is considered advanced!
> She handed me her MacBook silently and the look on her face said it all. Fix my computer, geek, and hurry up about it.
> [...]
> Normally when someone spouts this rubbish I just nod and smile. This time I simply couldn't let it pass. 'Not really, most kids can't use computers.' (and neither can you - I didn't add.)
I wonder if she recognized the look on your face when you internally condescended to her about the network proxy which you have not adequately documented for end users?
I’d say the same thing as the other teacher. I left out the word “connection”. But apparently he’d judge me for that.
If I brought my car to a mechanic to get fixed, and it's a real problem that requires an engine rebuild, I'd expect them to react very differently than if I brought it to them with the gas tank empty complaining it wouldn't start.
I think all they are taught is Microsoft Office and Adobe products. How many kids/teenagers know what 0x20 is these days without doing a WEB search ?
I mean I still had to stop for a brief moment and do the arithmetic in my head as I do when reading any number in a base other than 10.
Unless you mean recognizing "0x" as a prefix indicating the following number is in base 16?