Today’s smartphones, tablets and cloud platforms all provide convenient search functions. This convenience simplifies a lot of operations, but at the same time it also makes the concepts disappear in people’s minds. Some foreign professors found in their teaching that the new generation of students can no longer understand computer concepts such as folders and directories.
This phenomenon began to appear in 2017. Astrophysicist Catherine Garland asked the students to use simulation software to build a turbine model for the jet engine. Although she laid out the documents needed for the homework very clearly, she kept receiving calls from students for help. The students all stated that the program could not find their files. Catherine Garland asked the students where to download the file, such as on the desktop or on a shared hard drive. But the students all expressed that they did not understand the professor’s question.
Lincoln Colling, a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the Masters University, asked the whole class to open a file from a specific directory, and the students were puzzled. While in class, Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Columbia University EAFIT, noticed that the students in his class had trouble finding the documents they needed. In the same year, discussions began to appear on the STEM Educator Forum, seeking help explaining the concept of the document.
Those who are familiar with computers can easily understand that the directory structure is a hierarchical system used by the computer operating system to arrange files. When downloading files, the computer can choose to save the files in any folder in “Download”, “Desktop” or “My Computer”. There can be another layer of folders in a layer of folders to facilitate the classification of files. However, the current new generation does not know how to sort and classify a large number of files, and will only stuff them into one folder at a time, and some even put all the files on the desktop.
Now the new generation is most exposed to mobile phones and tablets. Among them, mainstream applications such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube all send information directly to the viewer’s eyes. It is no longer necessary to search for information in layers of folders, making the new generation unfamiliar with the concept of folders. With the development of technology, more computer concepts will be forgotten in the future.
Source: THE VERGE
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