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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

I saw a teacher somewhere say that he had noticed that kids increasingly have trouble understanding how file paths work in computers. It's something I think is very intuitive and key to use a computer, but I guess when you're only used to smartphones you rarely if ever have to think about files and folders.

This is exactly why the Raspberry Pi was created, to enable kids to get computer experience in a world full of locked down phones and tablets.

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I spent a WEEK out of my computational basics curriculum teaching middle school students just about paths. Just about FILES and paths. Did this with a VPS and chromebooks SSHd in. Also, later, Raspberry Pi units.

They simply don't understand computers when they walk in my classroom door. They understand mobile app user interfaces.

There's something about a computer's file system that makes it a difficult thing for people to learn from scratch. I suspect it's something to do with how folders can be nested inside other folders to an almost infinite degree, and how nothing in the real world really behaves that way.

I tried explaining folders to my uncle once. He said "I don't need to understand all that mumbo jumbo, just tell me the steps!" What he wanted me to do was write down the folders he needed to double-click, and the order he needed to double-click them in, depending on whether he wanted to get to photos, music, or whatever. To him, that was easier than taking the time to learn what was actually happening in front of him.

> It's something I think is very intuitive

There is nothing intuitive about anything. It all depends on pre-existing knowledge how well people can connect them. Systems like paths and URLs have become out of style and hidden from the users, so most don' learn about them anymore.

> This is exactly why the Raspberry Pi was created, to enable kids to get computer experience in a world full of locked down phones and tablets.

Not really. RPI was about enhancing access to computers. Smartphones and Tables where much a of a thing back then.

I blame Apple for people not knowing about paths. An acquaintance always used windows and then switched to Mac. She usually had her stuff neatly organized, but a year later, there was zero organization any more, she was just using the finder. If search is good enough, you don't need organization. Folders and files are hierarchical categorization, you don't need that if you can access everything by search.

For security purposes and everything it's probably better to abstract away the idea of files and wall off apps like on mobile, and usability wise this is probably making tech more accessible to users to have super efficient search. They might not know how to use a file manager, but they still know how to use their computer

Yeah, it's absolutely fine for casual consumers, but similarly to cars, you're going to be really lost if something on one of those multiple layers of abstractions malfunctions.

People will have to accept paying for computer repairs like they do for car repairs. Moving everything into the cloud won't help; Google will be weird and generally has no support, so you'll need somebody to figure out why those docs aren't visible in drive.

The Finder exposes the filesystem hierarchy much like any other desktop file browser.

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