What computer skills are being lost from high school students?

by rawpixel

A software engineer, Chris Wellons, who is in charge of computer classes for 4 years at high school, is alarming that, with four years of experience, there are skills related to computers lost from students.

The Missing Computer Skills of High School Students «null program
https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/10/31/

According to Mr. Wellons, although students' PC skills and knowledge differ greatly among people, they have a common weak part.

One of them is the concept of " file, directory (folder), path ".

Students are grasping about the contents of the PC as "somehow seems to be in a hierarchical structure", but the students do not know how to describe "relative path" or "absolute path", "current directory" " It seems that we do not know what the parent directory is.

Mr. Wellons will first install "Linux" in class, but if you do not know "path", many arguments and shell commands will be restricted and you will not be able to move between directories, Because I can not talk about the file, firstly I will start teaching from the concept of "pass". This seems to take more time than I expected and it takes time to think again.

And, the point that you can not do " touch typing " is that it is caught in actually doing work.

There are no children who can touch typing among the students that Wellons teaches, it seems that everyone is hitting by looking at the keyboard. Naturally, the keying speed will be slower than touch typing, which will take time for all work. Mr. Wellons himself was slow to learn touch typing, and there were many things I thought would have been learned sooner, so I was worried that "low typing precision does not seem much fun even if using a PC" It is said that. Wellons can teach if "I do not know the path", but since touch typing is not knowledge, it is a point that Wellons can not do anything at all.

Moreover, I feel that Wellons is a problem is that it is thought that these problems will become worse from now on. Due to the spread of smartphones and tablets, the role of notebook PCs is also being deprived, and some Wellons' students have already touched PCs at home without coming out at all. Still, in the meantime the keyboard will not perish, it is considered to continue to be used as an important tool in the necessary place.

Therefore, Mr. Wellons for parents, inexpensive Raspberry Pi may be fine, so we call out that we want children to touch a general-purpose computer using mouse and keyboard.