[mlyle]

I think you missed my point.

Before, a huge portion of the population was using computers and had to peek under the hood. This means you got a lot more people who got curious about how the machine worked very early on.

I am teaching STEM stuff to kids these days-- programming in Scratch and python, etc. My friends and I, back in the day, were all poking around memory, rekeying Basic programs from magazines and moving on to writing Turbo Pascal programs, etc, at a pretty early age. I don't see this with the kids I teach. There's not as good of a path/funnel there, and I'm not sure whether the stuff we do to e.g. teach programming in elementary school, etc, are analogous exercises in computational thinking.

[kart23]

I agree with you. I was in high school a couple years ago, and lucky enough to take cs classes. What I experienced was not good. Most of the kids just showed up, did the projects, passed tests, and got A's. But they were not good programmers. They were just going through the motions, if you gave them something slightly outside their knowledge, they would likely just give up.

I think there's something fundamentally wrong with the way cs is taught, but its hard to teach computers in a class setting. You really need to inspire that deep interest that so many of us have in computers, and it's very tough to get at that in the modern day. Because of the overload of information and media that kids are getting thrown at them these days. It's very easy to sit down 20 kids and make a game in scratch, and call it computer science.

We should have kids use technologies that professionals use in their work. Setup a flask web server, write a scraper, use apis, etc. Stop dumbing down things, expect more from the younger generation. Those coding bootcamps sure as heck don't teach scratch right?

[cameronbrown]

I get your point.

I've also taught primary school kids (elementary) similar things, though fairly limited. Overwhelming what I've seen is most of them are fine with the tool they're shown and not much more, but those who do want to learn more aren't hampered by lack of exposure to the command line. Maybe a bit further behind, but they can figure it out quickly.

I think the trade off between this and computers being far more accessible is worth it.

[Avamander]

The percentage of such people was, is and is going to be minuscule who care the slightest amount about peeking under the hood or truly understanding. By your logic every computer user from previous generation should know more about computers, but actually they don't.