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Gen Z/A are good at using tech, but they don't really know anything about how it works. I work in IT support and it can honestly be a tossup sometimes if the person who doesnt know how to clear their cache is a boomer or not.

This has been a worrying trend in education. Parents assumed kids just knew how tech worked so they stopped teaching things like typing, office, or how to use the basics. Now we have people graduating who know how to use iPads and Xboxes, but have no idea how to manage a file structure (many honestly just use "recent"), or make a PowerPoint, and a lot don't know typing.

92 here. My boys 10 and 8 have their own machines, they are told to Google it first before I come help.

"I'm not raising end users...get your shit together kid."

Love,

SysEngineer Dad.

I had a meeting with a young person who had to have the concept of a directory structure explained to them for a half hour...and they're in charge of designing a file browser. 🤦‍♂️

I don't think the exercise was even successful.

I used to teach math in the local school. The kids had a great interest in 3D printing because I had a few fun items in my classroom that I had 3D printed. I decided to spend a couple of weeks teaching a bit of CAD through having the kids spend it designing a personalized key chain to print.

It took me 3 days of class time to teach them how to use a mouse.......They couldn't grasp the idea that a touch screen and CAD don't go together, you need that mouse to make it work. It quickly became apparent that things quickly became difficult for them if it doesn't have a touch screen.

And while some classes are always a bit better than others, there was always a noticeable number of them that struggled with using a mouse.

Computer natives are millennials. In due time, millennials will be what cobol programmers are in the coding world.
"On you want your recycle bin emptied? Yeah, thats gonna cost you."

I love that Gen Alpha won't even get this reference because the movie came out 30 years before they were born.

I wonder: Has this happened with anything else?

Where an older generation struggled to understand at all, a middle generation adapted to it early enough to witness all of the quirks, and then a later generation was born into an already-smoothed out system — and they all lived simultaneously?

Seems like a uniquely modern thing, but then again agriculture and clothing and currency have all had periods of rapid change in the past.

Like were there Generation F dudes out there like “omg we’re the only ones who understand knitting frames smh”?

I run a Makerspace and teach technology to kids. I don't think they are getting worse, but the difference between the lowest and highest skilled is bigger than ever before.

Those who are interested, learn so fucking fast and so thoroughly, because they have things like YouTube tutorials and Discord chat groups with like-minded nerds to teach themselves. BUT at the same time, it's easier to just remain a consumer, and never gain any deeper knowledge.

I think curiosity and attention are quickly becoming the most important skills by far.

They get handed locked down chromebooks or iPads at schools. They’re only really exposed to a walled garden, and they also aren’t explicitly taught a lot of concepts that need to be taught (almost all MS/HS I’ve met have passwords which are just sliding their finger across the keyboard - it’s bewildering. I teach “correct horse battery staple.”)

You can’t learn much if you can’t install your own software. Learning is breaking things though, and most schools seem allergic to hiring competent tech teams/setting up sandboxed computer labs. Security concerns are huge - eg, if your kids school uses PowerSchool they probably got hacked this year - but when your teaching physics and can’t install MathLab or whatever…

There are still the little geeks that figure out how to get video game emulators going - Pokémon Emerald is probably more popular among middle schoolers today than it was in 2005.

I'm a xennial. I was so excited by computers, and later the internet. It completely absorbed me to the point that I would get up an hour early for school so I could mess around with the computer before catching the bus. A beautiful (ugly) Compaq with a 200n megabyte hard drive, 2 megs of ram. 86 architecture. I was about 11 years old.

I played a few games, but I spent much more time messing around the system in DOS. Making batch files, then working with qbasic. Of course I played Nintendo games as well. After we got internet I used a 28.8kbps modem to upload my own webpage via FTP.

I remember thinking, even as a child/teenager, that the kids of the future were going to be incredible, being born into the digital internet age. I was so wrong. My classmates struggled with computers because they weren't amazed by them like I was. Touch typing class had nothing on ICQ.

I think there are a lot of xennials on Lemmy. It was crushing to see that the generations before and after us can't comprehend the basics of computers. Then smartphones happened and everything got so much worse.

At a recent gaming expo one of the tables was showing a new game for pc. 50% of the kids that approached the table didn’t know how to use mouse and keyboard. The next day they added Xbox controller support and more than half of the people that didn’t know before then were able to figure out how to play.

I think this boils down to not education but poverty. Entry level computers cost way more than an entry level console. Sure you can buy a piece of crap laptop for $250 but it won’t be able to play ANYTHING. A $250 Xbox does everything you need and more. Most games today are not made to be played on $250 computers.

Late GenX (really, between X and Millennial): we expected everyone after us to understand tech. Nope.

I completely blame schools adopting ChromeOS for this generational failure.

At least give them a functional OS god damn. People out here not knowing you can do more than access like 5 websites and apps with literally anything that has a microprocessor in it.

They're about as well prepared to deal with computers as people who had a teddy bear when they were children are prepared to be a veterinary.

I’m an 80’s kid. We had to learn everything: MS-DOS, Windows, how to install OS’s and software, serial ports, etc. Nothing was easy or convenient. You had to LEARN how and why things worked if you wanted to run games and things.

My dad never used any of our actual PC’s. He wouldn’t know which way to hold the mouse, much less anything else. We tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t grasp any of the fundamentals.

But with an iPad? That’s easy. It just works. He can e-mail, do Facebook, watch YouTube or other streaming…

Point is: we made shit way too accessible and convenient. Kids never have to learn anything anymore. So they don’t. We literally had to teach interns the basics of working with a desktop; all they’ve ever used was an iPad and phone.

It also lead to the destruction of the old web. Back in the early to late ‘90’s, you had to be a nerd to use it. To WANT to use it even. But now that it’s so easy and convenient even my completely tech illiterate dad can get online, things have turned to shit. We never should’ve made it this convenient.

CD drives were too big so drives were developed that only took half a CD, which is shaped like a C.

What's a computer?

There exists a generation of people today that do not know that the save icon shows a floppy disk. They have no idea what a floppy disk even was.

I feel old now and will go back into my cave and weep quietly.

Don't know no C, only /dev/sda1.

This. The fundamentals of things computers do is so heavily abstracted now days, all kids know how to do is work with those abstractions.

Gen Z: Where is my file and what is a directory?

https://web.archive.org/web/20250128111653/https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z