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Ask Slashdot: What Tech Skills Do HS Students Need To Know Now?
heybiff writes: During summer months I deliver brief tech workshops to high school students as part of an enrichment program. Almost all of the students are average students pulled from non-magnet comprehensive high schools throughout our city. Make no mistake — these are not the students who have a love of technology and coding; many were coerced by excited parents or guidance counselors. After doing this for almost 10 years, I have found students have become considerably more comfortable with technology, and confident in their use, especially with smartphones and tablets being ubiquitous. Unfortunately, I also see a lot of basic knowledge and tech skills all but nonexistent. Moreover, students seem unaware that the tech they use daily even has any usefulness for academic activities. So what I put to you fellow Slashdotters is: What do students today realistically have to know to be successful in school? Which tech skills are still important and necessary, and which are gone the way of the typewriter? What misconceptions or outright lies have become so ingrained in young people's use of technology that they need to be addressed? Finally, the program puts laptops in students' hands, to give them a kickstart in being successful; what skills do they need to get the most out of the new hardware they were just given?
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Really, the main mental skills you need in tech are pretty simple: understanding the goal/problem, breaking a problem down into steps, then putting everything together at the end.
If someone can figure out how to take a meal, make a recipe that makes the meal, then follow the recipe to make a meal, they'll be mostly fine.
Use of spreadsheets is an adult-level skill they will use all their lives and a non-frustrating gateway into building solutions to numerical tasks. Their concreteness makes them accessible, the rectangular-grid layout makes them clear about what is happening, and the ability to keep improving them until you get them to do what you want makes them non-frustrating. Students who have had painful and futile math-in-school experiences (usually algebra) are especially gratified to have a tool that lets them handle sets of numbers correctly.
In addition to the low threshold, there is a high ceiling. The graphing capabilities, the extensive set of built-in formulas, and the potential to have some cells control the values of other cells means that spreadsheets can make use of as much inventiveness as most people can muster. And if someone thinks of a data-based project that a spreadsheet is not a good fit for, then they can branch out into databases and programming with a good foundation in precise thinking.
I'm 15. "Programming" = formulas in excel at my magnet ECHS/STEM dual-credit high school tied with 2 colleges.
This may be funny, but see also the /. news earlier this day: /./microsoft-to-teachers-using-pens-and-paper-not-fair-to-students
Cursive does teach motor skills in your hands, eye-to-hand coordination etc. And writing is still a basic skill that's needed in every job that requires discussing complex ideas with others.
On OP's question "What do students today realistically have to know to be successful in school?" I would say that the skills I see lacking are reading, writing and basic math. Especially the first one will get you anywhere you want...
Colorblindness is not a disease, it's a way of living
Learning what is today's standard is fine even if 5 years from now it won't be. It plants basic principles that will assist students in learning the newer things. JS language and structure allows you to quickly jump into C, C++, C# because the base is the same.
HTML in the 90's is still valid today. The basic concept remains with added enhancements in the form of CSS, JS, Flash...
The most important thing in school is to learn how to learn. They do this by forcing students to be creative and resourceful.
Yup, and it's frustrating dealing with people with this mindset. I had a woman who held up her deployment of Office 2013 because she was convinced that uninstalling 2010 would nuke all her stuff. It took myself,the IT director, her boss and her all sitting down and us saying multiple times that this was not the case. This woman just could not understand that her files were not "in the program" but in their own container on the disk. Separately she could manage what we were saying when it came to individual components / concepts. I think she reached her internal RAM limit or something trying to envision files in this corner, program goes to said corner to get file.
My son (14) recently asked for a mp3 manager program. I told him to use the damn filesystem, and google it if he didn't understand. He has all his stuff tagged and arranged by folder, only took him a couple hour to arrange 1000's of songs, and he now understands how a filesystem works.
"Science is the power of man"