The Point and Click Generation

When my daughter was in the first grade back in the 90s, she conveyed a shocking revelation at the dinner table. Her classroom had computers without mouses!!

“How do you click?” she asked. She was incredulous. It was as if she had encountered a car without a steering wheel or a house without doors or windows.

Many years later, while in college, she was struggling in her first programming class. After a quick look at the course materials, it was clear that if she kept taking programming classes in college that she’d quickly learn to hate the subject.

I told her, “Do not take anymore computer classes.”

So I spent many summers during and after college teaching her programming and she is now a professional programmer. But when she was learning how to program, I was reminded of her shock at the mouse-less computers. She was continually shocked by how stupid computers were.

Nearly every question she’d ask started with, “Can’t I just…” And to that my answer was almost always, “No, you have to tell the computer how to do all of that yourself.”

She is part of what I call The Point and Click Generation. They grew up with computers like my generation grew up with toasters.

They were no more afraid of computers than we were of toasters. But, toasters are pretty simple machines. Computers are not.

Her generation sees computers as these magical boxes, where anything they want is only a click away. It’s shocking for them to learn that computers are stupid machines and that humans are the smart ones.

The Problem with Parents and Teachers

Many parents see their kids navigating effortlessly with technology and think, “My kid is a technological genius.” But in reality, just like their parents, they have no idea how anything in the computer works.

Technology has changed so fast that there are teachers still teaching today who were teaching before computers were in every home, let alone, every classroom. These teachers are ill-equipped to educate the next generation for a technological future.

And curriculums fall far short of what’s needed. Technology classes, when offered, consist of teaching students how to type, use Word or Excel. Why? Because that’s all the teachers can teach. They don’t understand computers, so how can they teach it.

The Problem with Colleges

Colleges do not teach Programming. They teach Computer Science. That’s as crazy as not teaching Engineering and only teaching Physics.

So instead of teaching students the things they’re going to need in a job market that’s clamoring for programmers, they overemphasize subjects, like Sorting and Floating Point Number Formats. And they require unnecessary courses like Calculus and Physics.

The curriculum hasn’t changed much in the 30 years since I was in college. The inordinate amount of time and energy students spend trying to understand incidental subjects is sad and counterproductive.

Just like the rest of the educational system, college curriculums are weighed down with antiquated subjects. And since high school’s idea of a technology course is Photoshop at best and Typing at worst, college has to cram in everything a student needs to enter the workforce in 4 short years.

The Problem with Online Courses

Online Courses have risen to fill in the gaps between an antiquated Educational System and dynamic Business Requirements. Coding Bootcamps promise results and jobs, not in years, but in months and sometimes weeks. And at a greatly reduced cost compared with colleges even though the cost in many cases is quite substantial.

Yet these bastions of hope and promise fail to teach the basic concepts. Instead they rush to teach students Programming Syntax and popular Frameworks leaving most students helpless once the course’s handholding ends.

They fail to teach conceptual basics and to give the students the time to build the basic skills of programming. Copying code from the results of a Google search is a primary skill that most students and even Junior Developers must rely on since they lack the skills and experience of writing simple solutions to common problems on their own.

This is why FizzBuzz exists. FizzBuzz is an extremely simple programming assignment that’s given to programmers on interviews to make sure that they can write simple code and yet, by some accounts, over 80 to 90% of applicants fail this test.

This is the equivalent of a bus driver not knowing how to start the engine.

The Gap

The Educational System allocates about 2 years to teach programming students the necessary skills to prepare them for the Business World. It starts with pretty much the same curriculum it had 30 years ago when technology was in it’s infancy.

They are unable to cram 30 more years of advancements into those 2 short years. They are either ignorant to the real world needs or apathetic. Either way, students pay and suffer. And businesses pay and suffer.

The Online Course ecosystem has even less time. So they start at the other end of the spectrum. They start with business needs and job requirements, and then try to get students to match those needs.

But in their haste to jobify students, they fail to lay the proper foundation and produce programmers with highly volatile skill sets. Without foundational skills, these students will quickly be left behind once the industry changes. And the industry always changes.

Even if a college graduate took online courses, they’d still be lacking skills. The Educational System starts at one end of the spectrum and fails to reach the halfway point. The Online Courses start at the other end and also fail to make half the span.

And so there’s a Gap. And the sad thing is that it’s the rare individual who goes to college and then continues with online courses. So most students are sorely under skilled and undereducated.

The Solution

If you’ve made it this far in this article, I commend you for having an attention span in the top 5% of most people, and I suspect you’re anticipating some solution that you can either adopt or berate in the comments.

I would be remiss if I didn’t attempt a solution but I also would be arrogant to suggest that my solution is both complete and the best, or either.

The reason we have The Point and Click Generation is because technology and the world have moved more rapidly in the last 30 years than it has in the previous 100, while the Educational System, which efficiently churned out factory workers for an Industrial Revolution that’s long gone, is nearly indistinguishable from it’s 130 year old self.

The reason the Educational System and Online Courses both fail so spectacularly is because they emphasis Knowledge over Understanding. Knowledge is easy to test for. Understanding is not.

But it’s Understanding that is needed.

Programming and Technological concepts should be in the forefront of the curriculums at the same level as Math.

Not everyone will be a mathematician but we teach Algebra to most students. Why? Because it helps you think and solve problems.

Not everyone will be a programmer. But why teach it? Because it teaches you how to think and solve problems.

Almost everyone deals with programmers either directly or indirectly in their jobs today. Imagine if nurses didn’t speak the same language as the doctors they work with. In business, this mismatch is a daily occurrence.

A foundational way to teach needs to be implemented. This starts with understanding what is a problem and then how to solve that problem.

Let me give you my definition of a Problem. A Problem is the difference between the desired and the actual. Everything in your life is a problem under that definition.

Your shoes are untied. That’s the actual. You’d like them tied. That’s the desired. You have a problem.

If your parents didn’t teach you the skill for tying your shoes, then you cannot solve your problem.

Everything we do as humans is solving a problem of one sort or another.

Education should have one overarching goal: To teach and train students how to solve problems. How to search for the questions to ask to solve these problems. How to learn to decompose complex problems into smaller, simpler ones. How to embrace failure as a necessary part of learning.

Many would argue that Mathematics does this. I’d argue that we do not teach Math that way. Those skills are required to excel in Math, but we teach Math directly.

We need to be teaching Problem Solving and the thinking that goes along with it directly and then students can apply that invaluable skill to Math, History, Science and their everyday lives.

Until we understand the problem of The Point and Click Generation, we cannot hope to solve that problem. And the problem is that most of us are product of an Educational System that hasn’t prepared us to be good Problem Solvers.

But this problem is solvable. But it won’t be solved by tweaking an already broken system. It’s time for revolutionary thinking. Drastic measures.

We need to rebuild education from the ground up.