Sweden embraced screens in classrooms and pushed books aside. Years later, the country is making a costly reversal that says everything about what went wrong.
The sorts of computers kids should be using are things like Raspberry Pis, and they should be using them to learn about computing itself, not just using a word processor for their homework or whatever.
I have a whole schpiel I could get into about it, but I’m busy so the TL;DR is that the whole point of a computer is its programmability – its ability to solve novel, bespoke problems that are unique to a single user’s needs. That means you’re not actually “computer literate” unless you can program, or at least pipe together some console commands or figure out a novel workflow in a collection of GUI apps or whatever. It’s not about touch-typing or rote memorization of specific functions in common apps; it’s about developing general-purpose problem-solving skills. Those are valuable for everyone, not just professional software engineers.
Plus, knowing at least a little bit about how computers work is increasingly crucial in terms of understanding things like, say, the limitations of LLMs. That, I hope you can agree, is important for much the same reasons media literacy is.
The sorts of computers kids should be using are things like Raspberry Pis, and they should be using them to learn about computing itself, not just using a word processor for their homework or whatever.
Why? Some kids, maybe, but it’s pretty useless for 99% of people. Kids should be taking media literacy classes.
I have a whole schpiel I could get into about it, but I’m busy so the TL;DR is that the whole point of a computer is its programmability – its ability to solve novel, bespoke problems that are unique to a single user’s needs. That means you’re not actually “computer literate” unless you can program, or at least pipe together some console commands or figure out a novel workflow in a collection of GUI apps or whatever. It’s not about touch-typing or rote memorization of specific functions in common apps; it’s about developing general-purpose problem-solving skills. Those are valuable for everyone, not just professional software engineers.
Plus, knowing at least a little bit about how computers work is increasingly crucial in terms of understanding things like, say, the limitations of LLMs. That, I hope you can agree, is important for much the same reasons media literacy is.
They hardly even use the hardware at all, its all on google drive and canvas or whatever now