When did the change occur? (Computer Skills)

[Goobley]

I know this is a subject that has been discussed many times but I do find it kind of worrying that kids aged 9+ have no idea of the simplest operations of a computer. It reminds me of a few weeks ago where I was talking to some first year comp sci. students on campus who had never written any code before coming to university and were still battling to make something akin to a fizzbuzz test work (in Python FFS!) after a year of uni.

I suppose we need to make some leaps in AI over the next few years so that computers and OSs can be built by other machines as (in general - not everyone of course) we seem like we might be lacking in the future. I believe there's little substitute for learning this stuff at a young age, although I'm also highly doubtful that any government attempt to put any real IT skills into the curriculum will be the slightest bit successful.

I remember at age 10 my computer was an old mac that ran OS 7 and eventually 8.6 (which fixed 7's major pitfall of programs being able to steal each other's memory!). It ran Word 5.1 and equivalent as well as an IDE that I used for Java and Pascal.
I suppose I'll just have to leave it on a hypocritical note and say that I blame the internet even though I couldn't do half the things I do without, however I didn't have the internet until I was 10 (I didn't get to use it until we had ADSL).

Any of your own personal suggestions for the future?

[herulach]

Part of the problem is that people associate being good with computers with able to add up a row of numbers in excel. For the most part the fact that things do just work is a good thing, but it does remove the capability to tinker that those of us who grew up around DOS (yay boot disks!) and other craptastic stuff like that neded to learn, that then sticks with you.

It amazes me how impressed people are by even fairly basic use of advanced stuff in office (even stuff as straightforward as pivot tables). In my line of work (electronic payments) theres a huge amount of data interchange in flat file formats, and the fact that I know the difference between a *nix and windows line terminator causes a problem literally blows some peoples minds.

[OilSheikh]

Aww... all cute kids : )

[wasabi]

I think a lot of this stuff is rather unfair to the younger generation. i dabble with custom images on my Android phone and some of the stuff that tinkerers are coming up with still shows the same pioneering spirit I found back when I was a kid.

The gotcha nowadays is that everybody who owns an computer / tablet is part of the IT landscape. Computers, any idiot can use them, and most of them do.

[Phage]

Pffft. I didn't even own a Pc till my late 20s.
We could smoke in the office and we had a tea lady. You could have said the same thing about cars.
Better to teach them thinking skills.

[TheAnimus]

20+ years ago, if you had a computer, you probably had a leaning, and aptitude to certain kind of thought. Getting a game to run, was an effort.

Getting sound to work on said game, was an accomplishment.

Then you had all the fun and games of dealing with say extended memory and the most awful of all, the terminate and stay resident TSRs.

I remember a monopoly clone game on my Acorn, out of curiorisity I started to disassemble it. Shift Double Click! I could see all the resources (not related to the code) and started substituting the sprites with ones of my own choosing. I think I was about 6 at the time.

Then I wanted to change the prices, so I opened up the code, all interpreted, so I could see it there.

It was simpler to get your head around.

The same thing is true today, many people will make websites, for that they will use the brain cancer that is PHP. Why? Because it's incredibly simple to learn, the hello world is simple, if you can FTP a file, you can do some, get it working and learn from there.

Meanwhile, what I'd want for someone coming to work at my company involves familiarity with an amazingly complex set of IDE tools and add-ins.

The complexity, the learning curve is massive.

This is why I didn't think much (and still consider it to be a massive failure for it's stated goal) of the Raspberry Pi. It hasn't helped kids learn things. It's far too complicated, there are way to many things going on, if you want to flash an LED, teaching a kid how is maddeningly complex, compared to a £1 uC!

[herulach]

SNIP..
This is why I didn't think much (and still consider it to be a massive failure for it's stated goal) of the Raspberry Pi. It hasn't helped kids learn things. It's far too complicated, there are way to many things going on, if you want to flash an LED, teaching a kid how is maddeningly complex, compared to a £1 uC!

OT, but I agree with you on that part, in terms of basic programming skills arduino does a much better job - mainly because it generally lets you achieve something you couldn't do with 5 minutes in an app store. I have a pi, but after about 10 minutes its been relegated as a raspbmc unit driving one of the monitor inputs for when I want to watch a movie without the pc on.

[peterb]

But this is true of all technology. Those of a certain age may remember magazines such as "Practical Electronics", "Practical Wireless" and "Wireless World" - and others which de-mytified electronics and RF design, both solid state and thermionic valves. How many of today's generation would recognise aHartly or Colpitts oscillator, or know what a revolution the Wadley Triple loop was, or describe the principles of the Phase Locked Loop.?

Probably very few, but does it matter to the average consumer of electronic devices?

Where it does mater is for the design of future devices and the improvement of existing designs, but that only applies to relatively few people who will go on to be the RF and electronics designers of the future.

[jim]

With time, computing has become popular, rather than niche. From a time when only a few nerds had computers that they could connect to the internet, now everyone has laptops, mobiles, games consoles etc.

As they've become mass market, they've become easier to use. I remember reinstalling Windows 95, and having to understand how to use the command line. Admittedly, it wasn't much, but I still had to. I remember tweaking Regedit frequently back in Windows XP. I remember attempting to build a website, and the only way I knew how was to build it all out of HTML, testing as I went.

Now though, your average day-to-day activities don't need any tweaking. I haven't touched Regedit in years. With Steam, games tend to work straight away without any tweaking. If you want a website, the tools are alreayd there to prevent you from needing to code. Phone apps are even more simple - they either work or they don't.

For the average person, a PC is a tool - it exists to get a job done. And these days, they generally do. Unless you need to, why would you dig about in the code?

[Goobley]

Obviously as people have commented, it's certainly a good thing for the majority of people that no coding skills are required to make a computer work. I think what really annoyed me recently and the video made me think of it (nothing against the kids of course!) is having to comp sci students how to do number list tests in Python after a year of comp sci. It's not like we're talking VB or C++, but Python - I could probably teach my dog to write better Python than these people.
This happened a week before their exam (I don't do comp sci. myself):

"So how do I get the computer to run the test for multiple numbers?"

"Well, surely you'd be using a while or for loop depending on what sort of list your working from."

"I'm sorry... while... for... types of list..."

I would possibly expect someone at the end of first year to be wondering why a switch-case statement is frequently better than nested ifs and some of them definitely are of that level, one of the things the better people do one the first year course is AVR programming in assembly. I'm not making an example of those that don't turn up to lectures either - I have no pity for those and wouldn't waste my time helping them.
These people generally believe themselves to be "good" at "computers" and yet turn up not knowing one end of a shell from the other and these people don't seem to be the exception in my experience.

OT, but I agree with you on that part, in terms of basic programming skills arduino does a much better job - mainly because it generally lets you achieve something you couldn't do with 5 minutes in an app store. I have a pi, but after about 10 minutes its been relegated as a raspbmc unit driving one of the monitor inputs for when I want to watch a movie without the pc on.

I too very much agree with this, the full fledged linux kernel is a scary place for someone who doesn't know their way around it, especially compared to the OSs of old. The current stable (3.14.4) tarball is 78.4 MB. In general you're not going to get very close to actually understanding a computer through playing a level above this. It is, however, better than nothing.

I'm now just wondering what I would do if I was in charge of IT education. Like everything in life, it's something to be learnt by experience - but how should this experience be accrued?

@Phage: Thinking skills, definitely, and they of course have a much wider effect than computers. In my extremely biased opinion I would put more weight on Maths, Physics and real Design Tech (proper wood/metalwork) in schools, but considering that it's societally acceptable to say one doesn't "understand" maths/science (because they've never tried). I suppose what we're seeing with computer tech is just another symptom of the Chatterati-centric world we now live in


@wasabi: I'm glad to hear that the android dabbling scene is alive, people can learn a lot there. Unfair to the younger generation? I wouldn't really say so the people who have the pioneering spirit don't have to change their underwear every time they see a shell. Of course we don't need everyone to understand this stuff, but if there aren't problems for enquiring minds to delve into then the people we need don't get the opportunity to nurture themselves.

This has gone on far too long - must remove self from keyboard.

EDIT: Just saw peterb's and jim's replies: I think the thing that worries me is the designers of future generations getting sufficiently nurtured at a young enough age, rather than having everything spoon-fed. I know people used to say (a century+ ago) that the best mathematicians did their best work by the time they were 20. Nowadays people need to know more to do relevant work and start later - a bit of a double whammy. Along the same lines I was discussing with friends the other day the question of whether progress in Physics is going to slow due to more knowledge being required before being able to do any useful research. When one thinks that the most recent quark (top) was discovered in 1995 and is the subject of first year uni stuff. We fast seem to be approaching a point where current knowledge is growing as fast as we can train people in it - what then?

[peterb]

What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders [sic] of Giants

(After Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century)

But the point he was making was that his scientific contributions/discoveries were built on what others have done earlier. Yes, it may be necessary to revisit the earlier research (which in the light of later knowledge or observation, may have been flawed) but not always necessary.

In computer science, for example, the earliest compilers were designed and hand coded from scratch (or at least using assembler language). Now, compilers are themselves written in high level language before compilation, and assembler is little used. That said, for really efficient or real time applications, hand crafted code written in assembler may still be more efficient, (drivers are one application that comes to mind) but not many computer users are going to write their own drivers.

Of course, one could argue that the use of poorly written compilers or sloppy coding is contributing to the abundance of bloatware! One might also argue that it contributes to lack of programmer skills, for example relying (say) on built in referential integrity in a database, rather than coding it in from scratch. Then again, why re-invent a wheel?

[herulach]

(After Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century)

But the point he was making was that his scientific contributions/discoveries were built on what others have done earlier. Yes, it may be necessary to revisit the earlier research (which in the light of later knowledge or observation, may have been flawed) but not always necessary.

In computer science, for example, the earliest compilers were designed and hand coded from scratch (or at least using assembler language). Now, compilers are themselves written in high level language before compilation, and assembler is little used. That said, for really efficient or real time applications, hand crafted code written in assembler may still be more efficient, (drivers are one application that comes to mind) but not many computer users are going to write their own drivers.

Of course, one could argue that the use of poorly written compilers or sloppy coding is contributing to the abundance of bloatware! One might also argue that it contributes to lack of programmer skills, for example relying (say) on built in referential integrity in a database, rather than coding it in from scratch. Then again, why re-invent a wheel?

The actual answers probably somewhere in the middle, like most things. Ie use the purpose built tdatabase library (because why not) but know how it works (even if its only in principle) so you can avoid building it into everythign you write, but aren't overreliant onm it.

[Lucio]

I think a lot of it has to do with how the industry has shifted from supplying PC's that requires effort and maintanance to run, to being consumer devices which "just work"

There's no need for someone to spend hours learning how a PC works any more until you have to study them for either education or employment. Even then, the knowledge used becomes more specialised and specific.

All in all, it's a natural evolution, that the devices we use become a lot more complicated behind the scenes to present a better interface for the majority and speaking as someone who works in IT, I certainly benefit because the more arcane seeming and rarer my skillset is, the more I get paid to use it

[cookie365]

Well, I don't find it worrying that 9+ year olds aren't capable plumbers, and many would probably struggle to conduct a job interview effectively. And a tip from me: if your taxi turns out to be driven by a 12 year old, who says it was serviced at the local primary school, you probably want to politely decline and wait for a bus.

So I'm fairly relaxed about children not being expert computer engineers

[herulach]

Well, I don't find it worrying that 9+ year olds aren't capable plumbers, and many would probably struggle to conduct a job interview effectively. And a tip from me: if your taxi turns out to be driven by a 12 year old, who says it was serviced at the local primary school, you probably want to politely decline and wait for a bus.

So I'm fairly relaxed about children not being expert computer engineers

Nones suggesting they should be, just that the skills which were taught to a lot of youngsters who are probably 30-40 now, are no longer being taught in favour of the 'computers are a magic black box you using for loading office and looking at cat videos' type of training that goes on now.

[cookie365]

Well, that's what computers actually are these days.

The tiny minority of people for whom they're more than that have no right to force their own preference on everybody else.

It's not the 70s or 80s any more. So we shouldn't be teaching stuff to kids that might have been relevant for them in the 70s or 80s but isn't now.