I started my teaching career a couple of years after this blog post was written, and finished it three years ago, and I saw all the same things. We've gone from 'kids need to get to grips with computers' to 'computers need to meet users where they are', and UX designers have been more than happy to remove more and more functionality from user interfaces to follow this trend.
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.
What's crazy to me is it seems that we as a society have determined that it is far easier and more efficient to throw billions of dollars into a language token generating tool than teach people how to work with computers. It shows that most humans find it so psychologically painful to understand a system of rules and logical problem solving, that they choose to use an LLM, which in many instances is a far less efficient and salient solution.
this downplays how interesting it is to teach computers to speak (and parse) english (and chinese and every language, and be able to translate between all) vs teaching humans to speak computer.
speaking computer is precise. speaking human language is rich.
Our generation dreamed too of speaking with a computer as if it was a personal assistant. SciFi is full of examples. Kids now just were lucky to live in an era where it's starting to look doable.
But we still need to know how to use computers, even Scotty got down to a keyboard when needed.
we, as a society didn't get together and vote on "hey how should we best teach computers to people?" It came about through capitalism and having a free market of ideas. Framing it your way makes it seem weird.
Reminds me of how a significant number of students entering our CS program don't know what a file is. Lots of them never had to knowingly interact with such a thing.
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.
Anecdotally I had a ton of trouble getting engineering students to navigate through their filesystems and select files to compress them.
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.
Nope, it's really true. I can't speak for CS programmes, but in areas like bioinformatics I have first-hand experience of people (aged ~21/22 years) not understanding what file is or what a directory is. I think they're able to use them, but their understanding is so contextual to the place it's used. For example, they might be able to write some Python which creates a .csv, but connecting that to "open that file you created in a text editor" or "upload that file", they don't get it. I've read enough around people talking about this issue, and the consensus seems to be that people are so "app"-centric that thinking about a filesystem with applications accessing it in a generic way is alien to them.
To be clear, in my class it's a small fraction who struggle like this, but it's real.
The concept of a file only sort of gets modeled within the scope of what a directory is, with generic tooling; otherwise, you just have "documents". And there is also a big difference between really knowing what it is, and doing it a handful of times.
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".
No, OP is correct. I was teaching CS at a uni two years ago... files, directories, filesystem hierarchy, but yes, even just a file, this is a strange concept to them.
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.
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.
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.
Not an exaggeration, I can confirm OPs story at my own university. When I was in school (2010) the first year had a drop out rate of over 80%. The first class took out over 50%. Many people didn’t have any idea how to use a computer at all. The other weed out was after all the math classes.
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.
> post a meme to reddit, move pictures from their phone to their computer
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.
Absolutely not an exaggeration. I have encountered masters students who balked at the idea of opening a file in Python, despite that ostensibly being their language of choice for a machine learning class. The concept of where the data physically resided was also a mystery to them
I've heard this too. Specifically they won't know what a hierarchical filesystem is, and their understanding of files is based on iOS/android where you can do many of those actions directly from the share menu without ever interacting with the underlying file or the Files app.
We get resumes from people claiming "excellent computer skills", some of them using the word "digital native" - and they are completely dumbfounded and will stare blankly at the screen when their job in accounting needs them to copy a file from their desktop to some network drive on their Windows PCs.
I remember being asked why Google called its product "Google Drive" since it has nothing to do with driving a car. Honestly, I have to admit, it was a good question. Computer nerds take for granted that the word "drive" means "hard drive" but the general public doesn't necessarily make this word association.
A little strange you’d even want to be in a CS program if you didn’t understand files. I recently heard they stopped teaching C in some of the more well known CS programs too.
Really? When I was a freshman in the 90's, I had a friend whose problem was that every other person in the class had (like me) already been programming for years. He transferred to a different engineering discipline and graduated with a 3.7, so not an incapable guy.
I have a hypothesis that the proportion of really nerdy kids that take to technology hasn't changed and it was always a subset of society. People with affinity for understanding their computer and that find technical concepts natural may just be the oddballs.
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 agree, the proportion of really nerdy kids is the same, it's the proportion of really nerdy junior hires that has changed. There are both more jobs and more people trying to earn good money in tech, so you can no longer assume that your devs are nerds that are happy to go beyond their skillset to squash a puzzling bug.
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.
Ironically, I can make the case that programming killed Real(TM) technical competence.
"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.
As a new and naive parent I thought I would get my kid into hacking and computers by giving them a laptop with a basic Linux install as their first computer. I had visions of teaching them how to program and doing cool things with Arduino and kinds of awesome hacker projects.
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.
I don't know how things could be worse than 30-40 years ago. Not many people had access to computers, and it they had, it was either for business, or for playing games. In both cases, it was just going through a well-known path to achieve the goal, no exploration, no experimenting. Only a very small minority of kids were interested in programming. The fact that we have more accessible technology now doesn't change the fact that only a small minority of kids are interested in programming. The difference these days is that if they are interested in programming, they have so many resources available. YouTube videos on every single topic, AI chatbots capable of answering programming questions. If I had these tools as a kid, not having to rely on the 5 books in the local library, I'd learn so much more.
Computers were easier to use then. They had fewer concepts and those concepts were designed as analogies to what people knew.
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.
I had to dig out a physical manilla file folder from my filing cabinet to explain it to my kid. They have zero real world experience with the physical objects that the icons are supposed to represent.
30 years ago, computers were a powerful magic, and everyone thought that if you could master the magic, the world was your oyster. Nowadays, computers are a petty magic, like the goblins that spawn in boxes of spare cables and tie them into knots.
30 years ago was the beginning of the Dotcom boom. The web started in 1994-ish and computers were becoming pretty wide spread. Almost everyone had a Commodore 64 or if you were (un)lucky a Windows 95 PC.
Worth mentioning that despite mentioning kids in the title, the examples in the article include multiple cases of adults at the time who were also struggling . Pointing at smartphones and overly-simplified UIs is valid, but that still doesn't answer all of it – and the answers we have for ourselves won't fit with the present experience.
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!
A lot of computer literacy parallels between today's 15-to-30 year olds and the 45+ folks around me when I grew up engrossed in computing. They're making the same mistakes, having trouble with the same kinds of things, and lack the same mental models that the "old people" lacked back when I was growing up.
> When they hit eleven, give them a plaintext file with ten-thousand WPA2 keys and tell them that the real one is in there somewhere. See how quickly they discover Python or Bash then.
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?
I liked your question so much I ironically asked Gemini about this.
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.
I assumed this would be a challenge intended to be solved in a few days, not a single afternoon. Nowadays, other kids at school would have and give access to their AI as the solution would just be a prompt away. These days, you can't even stop kids from having internet and thus AI access for extended periods of time.
I donated my old gaming PC to my nephew (20 y/o). I told him that owning it also means maintaining it. I don't have time for that. Figure it out, "digital native".
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.
I’m not sure if you are trolling, but I’m pretty sure just attaching a file to an email is often more efficient. Not to speak of legibility or maybe the intended use for said documents. Sadly I don’t think you are trolling.
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!
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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.
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.
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.
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".
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 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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"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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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!
HN thread last time this was posted (12-ish years ago)
things are worse now, I presume.