SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Informative) by owl on Friday April 28, @07:17PM
This is a huge source of the issue. For a huge portion of the 18 year old's just now entering college, the only computer they have ever interacted with regularally is their cell phone. And on both Android and IOS, the filesystem and even files themselves are hidden away so deeply that it is quite possible for phone only computer users to literally not even know about files or filesystems.
Take photos/videos as an example. On phones, one does not open a "file browser" (if one even exists, Android has one, well hidden away, that is nearly impossible to use for doing anything but looking at "Downloads") and navigate to one's Photos folder to then find the files that are the photos and videos.
Instead, one opens the "gallery app" -- and the app hides away all the files and folders from the user. And this is the same with everything else on phones. If this is the only interaction with a computer a new college student has ever had, it is little wonder they simply do not understand "file" or "file system" or "folder" in any way at all.