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https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She'd laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn't find their files.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they'd saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. "What are you talking about?" multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn't understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations' understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
Professors have varied recollections of when they first saw the disconnect. But their estimates (even the most tentative ones) are surprisingly similar. It's been an issue for four years or so, starting — for many educators — around the fall of 2017.
That's approximately when Lincoln Colling, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Sussex, told a class full of research students to pull a file out of a specific directory and was met with blank stares. It was the same semester that Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia's Universidad EAFIT, noticed that students in his classes were having trouble finding their documents. It's the same year that posts began to pop up on STEM-educator forums asking for help explaining the concept of a file.
While some of us may find this phenomenon strange to understand it is becoming increasingly real for many. Are there any other examples of things that we take for granted becoming incomprehensible to those younger that ourselves? I'm not thinking of 'hanging up' the telephone, or why the icon for saving a file appears to some young people to be a vending machine, but things that cause difficulty for others.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by owl on Friday April 28, @03:43PM (7 children)
Ah, ok, there is a possible clue there. He was one of those who had discovered that a Computer Engineering degree was a path to a higher paying job, and was only taking that major from a "I can apply for those higher paying positions" point of view. No inherent interest in the topic, the"degree" was just a means to an end goal: "get a better paying job".
Little did he realize that this particular degree required some actual additional background knowledge and preferably some inherent interest in the subject.
Sadly, there is a baseline percentage of engineering students that are only there because "this piece of paper assures me a higher paying job" but otherwise have zero interest in the field. For those that don't fail out, when they do get out in industry, they become known to the ones who know what they are actually doing as "head-count".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @05:04PM
We prefer to call them dead wood - first to go when rank and yank comes down from above...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @06:11PM
In science, we call them Principal Investigator and they soak up all the funding.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday April 28, @06:40PM (4 children)
This gives me a thought: In arts studies, it is common that you'll have to demonstrate some abilities in the art to even be accepted. Maybe similar tests should be standard in computer science and engineering, too?
I guess demonstrating basic use of the command line would be a good test.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 28, @08:26PM (3 children)
I guarantee that understanding the command line is independent of understanding disk file structures. I learned the first in college...the second I learned on the job. (Well, that *was* a long time ago. Around 1970.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29, @01:28AM (2 children)
File systems before 1970 were stacks of punched cards, weren't they?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday April 29, @02:53AM (1 child)
No. The permanent ones were on tapes, but computers had disks for storing stuff while you were working on it. You had to roll things in from tape and back out to tape, but tape was slow, and random access on tapes was REALLY slow. (Of course, this depends on which computer you were using, but we rented time at a service bureau that had some medium fancy computers. [Actually that may have been a few years later, as it was after I graduated and went to work, but only a few.])
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29, @11:50AM
Our community college just replaced their last punch card terminals with CRTs the year I took a class there, probably 1985.
Those disks, even on an expensive multi user system had to be pretty tiny by today's standards, but then you probably were storing mostly plain text, not video or other media, so you still could have a fair number of files.
As I recall, folder trees on our VAX tended to be about four branches deep at the most: root, users, individuals, and most individuals would just keep files in their personal root, but some would have project folders.
Funny thing about line numbers and punch cards, when you drop a deck of punch cards and they get shuffled, there was a system program to sort them by line number for you.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end