Mark HurstNow THAT's a headline.
"The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents"
Jacqueline@markhurst I think that if kids were encouraged to use computers intelligently, as programmers rather than Internet users, and if kids were encouraged to go deep on their own, this would be less of an issue
anlomedadBut brains are wired differently, work differently, learn differently.
What the computerisation of the school experience does is brushing all kids with the brain_brush of the hard- and software designers.
And these designer_types are a tiny minority. Moreover, they're a tiny minority tending toward thinking that they are smarter than all others, so they are the brain types least suitable for learning from their mistakes.
I call them Excel brains for short.
Memory creation uses all sensory input, touch and smell too.
When memory creation in the brain is hindered because of the use of computers for content presentations – which inevitably deprive the process of sensory input –
it's obvious that cross-wiring memory later for creative or cognitive efforts also loses out.
But programmer brains don't get it. They also do not want to get it. Probably because it'd show them how their brain type is really not a desirable one at all...
What I mean by "Thinking like a programmer" is being able to take a problem and break it down into the smallest possible constituent parts, the way someone writing a piece of software is able to.
It's also a skill used in the sciences and the arts, but in a different way.
You can do the process of designing a computational solution to a problem, without having a computer.
Humanity did it for hundreds of years
Leonard Euler and Euclid both developed kinds of mathematical algorithms that are run on computers today.
They did them by hand. They didn't have a computer back then
The computational way of thinking is geared towards a continuous process of iterating and improving on your past results, which requires admitting your mistakes.
An algorithm that gives the wrong answer... Is a bad algorithm. Although, if it gives the rough approximation of an answer, that's a different story entirely