zerosleeps

Since 2010

Kids can't use computers

Secondary school teacher Marc Scott at Coding 2 Learn:

My favourite is from parents: ‘Oh, Johnny will be a natural for A-Level Computing. He’s always on his computer at home.’ The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

I remember fiddling around with my first Windows machine at home and knowing that I was going to spend the rest of my life working with computers. A couple of years later my high school got a stash of Windows computers, and I assumed that every kid my age and younger would be as excited about computers as I was.

In my teenage mind, that thought got translated into the sinking feeling that geeks like me wouldn’t be needed in the future - everyone would have a firm grasp of operating and programming computers.