I've taught a scientific computing course aimed at first year grad students in the biomedical sciences for about 15 years. This article absolutely mirrors my ex

I've taught a scientific computing course aimed at first year grad students in the biomedical sciences for about 15 years. This article absolutely mirrors my experience. When I started out teaching this course I could assume that students had a mental model of how the file system on their computers worked, but over time I've seen more and more students lacking what I had always assumed was basic knowledge. It's more acute among the undergrads I teach than grad students, but it's increasingly becoming the norm. I now devote a portion of a class session to reviewing this, and force them to use both the command line and the finder/file explorer in parallel so they see the correspondence. Part of the blame lies with the OS -- both Window and Mac OS do their best to obfuscate/hide the basic directory structure from the user with shortcuts. I'll add that my experience is at an R1/Top 10 (in the US) institution so this is NOT due to a lack of prior education or academic promise...