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Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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Looks like the kids are not all right...
- LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} repeated this.
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@geniusmusing Younger people seem to be more accustomed to using mobile operating systems, where this information is intentionally hidden.
(I also believe that schools' use of locked down systems teaches them not to explore or learn on their own, which is probably a big part of the problem.)
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I do see some of this already, in the sense that there are people who complain that something is missing from their desktop, but if you open the desktop folder in Windows Explorer, there are so many items there that some things get pushed off the screen.
But search-centric interfaces ... that's part of what made #Win8 so bad. Windows search is astonishingly bad and slow as well, so when Windows 8 tried to force it on users, they were understandably hostile.
But if you get used to redownloading the same photos and videos because your device's search cannot find the previous files, I guess SCI can sort of "work" for you.