Comment by BrenBarn
15 hours ago
This is my impression as well. From what I've seen, many Gen Z people only loosely even think in terms of things like "files". They are used to integrations where everything just lives on some website or in a Google app and the way you locate things is by searching.
I am a professor of CS and we found, post-pandemic, that very few students had any exposure to real computers. It was all smartphones and tablets. So the things you mention—not knowing what a file is—really is the state of things. We now explicitly talk about files in our intro programming courses, first as a general idea in CS1, and then we dig into (some of) the representations in CS2.
Although there has also been a softening of math skills among the weakest students, the best students are still quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills, not analytical skills.