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Kids can't use computers and this is why it should worry you (2013)
- iwanttocomment 2y agoAh yes, an article from 2013. "It was a different time."
- fsflover 2y agoWhat has changed related to the topic? Can kids learn computers easily today? (No)
- jmclnx 2y agoI do not know. I think all they are taught is Microsoft Office and Adobe products. How many kids/teenagers know what 0x20 is these days without doing a WEB search ?
- confidantlake 2y agoHow many kids/teenagers knew this 20-30 years ago? Less than 5%?
- nkrisc 2y ago> How many kids/teenagers know what 0x20 is these days without doing a WEB search ? I mean I still had to stop for a brief moment and do the arithmetic in my head as I do when reading any number in a base other than 10. Unless you mean recognizing "0x" as a prefix indicating the following number is in base 16?
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- ryzvonusef 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730 HN thread last time this was posted (12-ish years ago) things are worse now, I presume.
- nepeckman 2y agoYou mean "first time" right? The last time this was posted was 3 months ago, posted 19 times total since 2013 if I counted correctly
- ryzvonusef 2y agosorry yes, that's what i meant.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoMore similar discussion a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42590565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42590565
- jmclnx 2y ago>Mobile has killed technical competence. We now all carry around computers that pretend to be mobile phones or tablets To me this is a thing, I wonder how may kids out there hack their Computers if they even have one. In spite of AI, I expect a huge shortage of real programmers in 10 years or so and the teenagers of the 90s start retiring.
- fsflover 2y agoThis is why projects like Librem 5 and Pinephone as so important. Give one to your kid it they will learn computing.
- dagw 2y agoAs a new and naive parent I thought I would get my kid into hacking and computers by giving them a laptop with a basic Linux install as their first computer. I had visions of teaching them how to program and doing cool things with Arduino and kinds of awesome hacker projects. All I achieved was to convince them that computers are hard and stupid and not fun, and that iPads and Playstation are superior in every way.
- Workaccount2 2y agoLinux is something that your curiosity leads you to, not something that leads to curiosity heh
- fsflover 2y agoIt can be both of course, depending on the person and their mood, age.
- nickpeterson 2y agoI think a lot of it is goals/rewards. I got into computing as a kid because I wanted to play games that I saw in screenshots in magazines. Then I wanted the game I got running to run faster. Then i’m losing online so suddenly I’m learning about ping/networking. Fast forward a decade and I end up being a programmer. Most people won’t learn technical things just for the hell of it.
- gambiting 2y agoAnecdote from a friend who teaches a CS course at local university - kids these days arrive at a CS course not knowing how to use a mouse. Well, they obviously understand a concept of a mouse, but actually having experience with using a mouse? None, unless they are a gamer(which tbf, a lot of CS students are). But they get put on a computer in a lab with a mouse and keyboard and some of them genuienly struggle with the mouse. The explanation is simple - desktops are nearly extinct in homes unless you play games(and even then, it's a rare choice), so people have laptops and just use the touchpad as the default method of interaction.
- nkrisc 2y agoI think Apple captured this very concisely (for better or worse) in one of their ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfR_Jj4grZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfR_Jj4grZE "What's a computer?"
- jowea 2y agoI never understand how people can bear using a touchpad long term. Is carrying a mouse that hard?
- gambiting 2y agoIt's not about carrying a mouse. A staggering number of people don't work at any kind of desk anymore, teenagers included - you use the laptop while on a sofa, and that makes using a mouse inconvenient at best. And touchpads(especially on apple laptops) are ok nowadays.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoI don't know why they don't put the touch above the keyboard. I am constantly hitting the touchpad while typing.
- jowea 2y agoWell I must be a weirdo because I literally would rather use a mouse on top of the laptop keyboard than use the touchpad
- beej71 2y agoReminds me of how a significant number of students entering our CS program don't know what a file is. Lots of them never had to knowingly interact with such a thing.
- mtillman 2y agoA little strange you’d even want to be in a CS program if you didn’t understand files. I recently heard they stopped teaching C in some of the more well known CS programs too.
- looofooo0 2y agoHow can you understand files without a file system.
- bee_rider 2y agoI mean, I guess we’d have to define “understand files” and “understand a filesystem.” I mean, lots of people seem to think of files as popping in and out of Documents or Downloads based on semi-mysterious circumstances.
- dharmab 2y agoMaybe they are interested in making mobile apps, or video games.
- looofooo0 2y agoLol, I dont know what a file is tbf without further restrictions.
- ziddoap 2y ago>don't know what a file is Surely this is a wild exaggeration? If you said "CLI" I would believe it... But they would have had to download/upload a file to apply to the university, create a resume, post a meme to reddit, move pictures from their phone to their computer, etc.
- lukaslalinsky 2y agoI don't know how things could be worse than 30-40 years ago. Not many people had access to computers, and it they had, it was either for business, or for playing games. In both cases, it was just going through a well-known path to achieve the goal, no exploration, no experimenting. Only a very small minority of kids were interested in programming. The fact that we have more accessible technology now doesn't change the fact that only a small minority of kids are interested in programming. The difference these days is that if they are interested in programming, they have so many resources available. YouTube videos on every single topic, AI chatbots capable of answering programming questions. If I had these tools as a kid, not having to rely on the 5 books in the local library, I'd learn so much more.
- milesrout 2y agoComputers were easier to use then. They had fewer concepts and those concepts were designed as analogies to what people knew. If you don't know what a manila folder is, the icon means nothing to you and you have to learn it as an abstract entity. That is fine, but it slows down learning rate.
- ryandrake 2y agoI had to dig out a physical manilla file folder from my filing cabinet to explain it to my kid. They have zero real world experience with the physical objects that the icons are supposed to represent.
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- cjs_ac 2y ago30 years ago, computers were a powerful magic, and everyone thought that if you could master the magic, the world was your oyster. Nowadays, computers are a petty magic, like the goblins that spawn in boxes of spare cables and tie them into knots.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago30 years ago was the beginning of the Dotcom boom. The web started in 1994-ish and computers were becoming pretty wide spread. Almost everyone had a Commodore 64 or if you were (un)lucky a Windows 95 PC.
- DadBase 2y agoIn 95 I taught an entire summer camp to use FTP by whistling the tones into a phone line. Worked fine until one kid sneezed and we lost the server.
- Apreche 2y agoThe proliferation of Chromebooks as the standard at many schools hasn’t helped.
- bccdee 2y agoThis whole article has a really weird tone. > She handed me her MacBook silently and the look on her face said it all. Fix my computer, geek, and hurry up about it. > [...] > Normally when someone spouts this rubbish I just nod and smile. This time I simply couldn't let it pass. 'Not really, most kids can't use computers.' (and neither can you - I didn't add.) I wonder if she recognized the look on your face when you internally condescended to her about the network proxy which you have not adequately documented for end users?
- xivzgrev 2y agoYah the way he reacted about “the internet isn’t working” is like the teachers who were anal about “can I” vs “may I”, but with some shaming thrown in. I’d say the same thing as the other teacher. I left out the word “connection”. But apparently he’d judge me for that.
- ryandrake 2y agoHonestly, I didn't see anything wrong with the tone. The tone is one we've all experienced: Frustration with having to deal with gross incompetence over and over. If I brought my car to a mechanic to get fixed, and it's a real problem that requires an engine rebuild, I'd expect them to react very differently than if I brought it to them with the gas tank empty complaining it wouldn't start.
- JoshTko 2y agoAgree, very weird
- lblume 2y ago> When they hit eleven, give them a plaintext file with ten-thousand WPA2 keys and tell them that the real one is in there somewhere. See how quickly they discover Python or Bash then. I wish this would still work. Today's kids would instantly use AI to solve it. Does anyone have an idea for a challenge that will instill some level of technical literacy without being instantly gameable in the era of omnipresent LLMs?
- MSFT_Edging 2y agoThey cant access the AI without the WPA key. Probably there'd be some documentation printed out or local in this scenario.
- lblume 2y agoI assumed this would be a challenge intended to be solved in a few days, not a single afternoon. Nowadays, other kids at school would have and give access to their AI as the solution would just be a prompt away. These days, you can't even stop kids from having internet and thus AI access for extended periods of time.
- LPisGood 2y agoI think almost all 0-background beginner level tasks are gameable.
- Phanteaume 2y agoI liked your question so much I ironically asked Gemini about this. Out of the 5 answers it gave, those ones seemed interesting : >The Hardware Whisperer (Requires Simple Hardware): >Setup: Requires a cheap microcontroller like a Raspberry Pi Pico or an ESP32/ESP8266, plus maybe an LED or a button. >Task: "Make the LED blink out 'SOS' in Morse code when you press the button." Or: "Read the value from this simple sensor (e.g., temperature) and print it to the serial monitor only if it's above a certain threshold." >Why it works: LLMs can generate MicroPython or Arduino C++ code easily. However, the user must deal with the physical wiring, installing drivers/firmware tools, uploading the code, and debugging why it's not working (Is the code wrong? Is the wiring loose? Is the board getting power?). This physical interaction layer is opaque to the LLM. >Setup: Create a very simple text-based game (e.g., navigate a maze, guess a number with clues, a basic simulation) that runs locally. The game's state changes with each command. >Task: "Reach the end of the maze / Win the game." The rules might not be fully explained, requiring experimentation. >Why it works: The LLM can't play the game directly because it doesn't have access to the running process or its internal state. The user must interact with it, observe the output, and decide on the next input. They might use an LLM to suggest strategies or even write a script to automate playing the game (if the interaction pattern is simple enough), which itself teaches valuable skills.
- frankosaurus 2y agoMy neighborhood school issues Chromebooks to all kids starting in sixth grade. It's been an interesting, um, pedagogical experiment. In my kid's friend group (now 7th grade), the usage is all over the map. Some kids write C++ code or do Tinkercad. Others watch YouTube from 8am to the closing bell, during class and lunch. Still more spend their lesson time on Minecraft Educational edition. (YouTube is a bit of a loophole... Since some teachers use it for lesson material, the school's WiFi leaves it unblocked. So YouTube Shorts stands in for IG Reels and TikTok, which are blocked.)
- r0ckarong 2y agoWhile I share a lot of the frustration voiced in this piece it also reeks of someone who wouldn't allow anyone to drive a car without knowing how to swap the engine in their garage. "Reinstall Windows" is even worse than "just drop in a new engine". You're going to lose all the memories of the roads you drive on daily in the process. Good luck kid. Kids need to be educated better about these things but it takes tremendous amounts of time and patience (that a lot of parents simply can't find) to properly train kids in this way. People like the author and myself did that to ourselves, out of our own curiousity and more importantly, intrinsic motivation. It's simply completely pointless to expect every person to use a tool as ubiquitous as a computer or a car to be this deeply invested and interested in the operation. If we manage to get all users to be able to swap a tire we would already have come a long long way.
- SR2Z 2y agoI think this is more analogous to "know and understand that your car is powered by an engine and also vaguely get how it works." To be entirely fair, we have this exact same problem with cars. The sheer number of people who do not understand they need to change oil, rotate tires, and swap wiper blades is also too high. Even being able to change a tire yourself is considered advanced!
- cjs_ac 2y agoI started my teaching career a couple of years after this blog post was written, and finished it three years ago, and I saw all the same things. We've gone from 'kids need to get to grips with computers' to 'computers need to meet users where they are', and UX designers have been more than happy to remove more and more functionality from user interfaces to follow this trend. There's also a general aversion to anything that looks like logic or systems thinking, but that's a much older problem in education. Mathematics is, for most pupils, just a set of increasingly arcane rituals done with symbols on paper. The connection to the arithmetic of everyday life is tenuous at best. People love LLMs because they can talk to them just like a person, and the LLM will talk back just like a person. The fact that the LLM is a bullshit artist that doesn't know what it's talking about isn't just inconsequential; it's a bonus, because it makes it even more lifelike.
- gh0stcat 2y agoWhat's crazy to me is it seems that we as a society have determined that it is far easier and more efficient to throw billions of dollars into a language token generating tool than teach people how to work with computers. It shows that most humans find it so psychologically painful to understand a system of rules and logical problem solving, that they choose to use an LLM, which in many instances is a far less efficient and salient solution.
- fragmede 2y agowe, as a society didn't get together and vote on "hey how should we best teach computers to people?" It came about through capitalism and having a free market of ideas. Framing it your way makes it seem weird.
- robocat 2y agogh0stcat didn't say any of that: it appears you are framing them. Guidelines: In Comments: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
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- OliveMate 2y agoWorth mentioning that despite mentioning kids in the title, the examples in the article include multiple cases of adults at the time who were also struggling . Pointing at smartphones and overly-simplified UIs is valid, but that still doesn't answer all of it – and the answers we have for ourselves won't fit with the present experience. When I was young, the computer in the back room was monolithic and offered an infinite amount of interaction compared to all the other devices I owned, and it was natural that I'd find myself returning to it over and over again. But with the abundance of screens and connectivity in today's world, that sheer wonder & curiosity would probably be lessened for today's children. The family PC as an institution was key as well. A broad sandbox for children to mess around in and gain an idea as to how things worked from an early age, and the cost of it [usually] being the only PC in the house meant that adults had to seriously learn how to set up & maintain it as well as teach us how to use it. But this was supplanted and atomised by cheaper laptops when Vista rolled around, then rendered non-existent in the era of smartphones. > There are always one or two kids in every cohort that have already picked up programming or web development or can strip a computer down to the bare bones I feel like of all things, this is mostly nurtured by PC gaming. You naturally learn about tweaking settings, installation locations, hardware, config files, troubleshooting issues, and if you're creative or have an apt for programming then you can find yourself making your own game mods. I've heard from Gen Z friends how they got their start learning to port forward so they could run a Minecraft server with their mates!
- ryandrake 2y agoA lot of computer literacy parallels between today's 15-to-30 year olds and the 45+ folks around me when I grew up engrossed in computing. They're making the same mistakes, having trouble with the same kinds of things, and lack the same mental models that the "old people" lacked back when I was growing up.
- ryandrake 2y ago> 'What was the error message?' I ask, and he shrugs his shoulders. I follow him to the IT suite. I watch him type in his user-name and password. A message box opens up, but the kid clicks OK so quickly that I don't have time to read the message. He repeats this process three times Ugh, my daughter does this, and it's infuriating. How are you supposed to make any progress if you don't read what's wrong with it? I think as programmers, we should recognize that our programs which are already inundating users with unnecessary pop-ups and notifications, are training them to just dismiss every message from the computer. Any time your PM says "I know, we need to tell the user this, so pop up a message..." don't do it!
- iteratethis 2y agoI donated my old gaming PC to my nephew (20 y/o). I told him that owning it also means maintaining it. I don't have time for that. Figure it out, "digital native". Within 2 days he had it ruined. Kept running hot and crashing. I told him over the phone how to analyze the problem. Nothing what I said made any sense to him. So I came over and saw that he had installed 50 or so new programs, some very dubious. Zero security awareness, just click on anything like a grandma. One program was rogue and took 100% CPU in a forever loop. He had never heard of task manager to inspect such a problem. Completely clueless on how to use a PC or operating system. He also has a sister. I asked her to share a document. She opens the document on the laptop and proceeds to make photos of the doc with her phone and sends them to me. These are middle-class young adults with decent education (in theory). It's shocking.
- brador 2y agoThat is the most efficient way to share a document between users in 2025. Requires no signup, no logins, no malware risk, no paid subscription, no special software, no special hardware. What were you expecting her to do?
- anon22981 2y agoI’m not sure if you are trolling, but I’m pretty sure just attaching a file to an email is often more efficient. Not to speak of legibility or maybe the intended use for said documents. Sadly I don’t think you are trolling. Also: a computer (where the documents were) has the required hardware and software to send the documents as is. Your phone is the special and external hardware in this case, not the computer (also probably more expensive than the computer). Your phone requires signups and logins as much or even more than computers. I don’t know what paid subscription you would need to share these documents. Plenty of free methods. I don’t know why you are talking about malware? Do you think the documents might mutate into malware while traveling the internet? I think the risk exists with pictures too, be careful out there!
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