Comment by BrenBarn
17 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'm also noticing another trend with my 16yr old daughter and her friends. They are craving old school offline experiences. They have all dragged out the parents and relatives old music collections, cruising second hand shops for old CDs etc. when they visit others houses they are checking out each other's household book and music collections.
She recently got a cheap digital camera with no screen and just a shutter button and and plain old viewfinder. The idea is that like the old days you don't know what you took a photo of until (a bit like getting the film developed) you plug the SD card into a computer and have a look.
I think she'd get a kick out of ripping CDs and ditching Spotify. I can teach her all about files and filesystems then haha.
My 19yr old son doesn't follow the same old school stuff, but he kinda shunned social media from the beginning.
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.