> In the future, kids will be less and less exposed to keyboards, and productive computing in general.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that this isn't a new thing at all. It's just that, in the past, fewer students had access to computers, and those who did generally understood them better. Now, it's not that the average high school student doesn't have access, but that the vast majority don't have any interest in how the machine works. It's the same percentage of the total who are interested and good at computing but it's just that a much lower percentage of the computer users are good computer users, in my experience.
High school "computer science" classes in my area seem to teach "you always need to type public static void main(String[] args) for your program to work", as opposed to teaching students what that means. As with in the past, the students who are really good at computing do most of their learning outside of school.
I think it's more of a neomania problem. New and shiny equals better.
Now "IT" is thought to be good, and lecture rooms are getting "digitalized". Where digitalization means something horrible, using tablets and slides (which will encourage shallow thinking and distraction). That's at least the trend now in some elite schools I attended more than a decade ago.
In contrast, when I went to a (pretty forward thinking) kindergarden in the late 80s, we were taught Logo. During early elementary school I vividly remember how recursion blew our minds.
From any possible point of view, the same school had a much more avant-garde education 25 years ago. Now try to convince policy makers.
Same applies to CS schools. I was lucky enough to be taught Prolog, Smalltalk and ML during freshman year. We emphasized concepts over technologies. Now it's the other way round.
> "you always need to type public static void main(String[] args) for your program to work", as opposed to teaching students what that means.
I've always wondered how practical it is to truly teach that though. Programming is incredibly abstract, and the less abstract you make it the harder it is to learn. I feel like making that leap from "just write this to get it to work" and understanding what's really happening will always take individual initiative.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that this isn't a new thing at all. It's just that, in the past, fewer students had access to computers, and those who did generally understood them better. Now, it's not that the average high school student doesn't have access, but that the vast majority don't have any interest in how the machine works. It's the same percentage of the total who are interested and good at computing but it's just that a much lower percentage of the computer users are good computer users, in my experience.
High school "computer science" classes in my area seem to teach "you always need to type public static void main(String[] args) for your program to work", as opposed to teaching students what that means. As with in the past, the students who are really good at computing do most of their learning outside of school.
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