It’s perhaps more like maths. There’s an element of human communication, and an element of underlying truths.
I think there’s a problem in education.
I’ve learnt computers through Computer Science based education, so I don’t have personal experience of this, but I’m told that computing education for non-specialists is very much focused on learning by rote, “these are the exact steps to do X”, with no attempt to understand the system in general.
Thus, when people have any problem outside the very specific examples they’ve learnt, they can’t cope.
The next question is, obviously, why is computing education structured like this?
My theories:
A lot of education works like this. We generally believe far too much in rote learning. Rote learning is probably more suited to situations that don’t change too much, but is deployed in computing where the details you might rote learn are likely to change drastically in a relatively small number of years.
People don’t like thinking about computing. They want to do the minimum necessary to accomplish their non-computing task. However they make a falsely small estimate of the amount of computing knowledge required for this, and actually end up making their task more difficult.
It’s perhaps more like maths. There’s an element of human communication, and an element of underlying truths.
I think there’s a problem in education.
I’ve learnt computers through Computer Science based education, so I don’t have personal experience of this, but I’m told that computing education for non-specialists is very much focused on learning by rote, “these are the exact steps to do X”, with no attempt to understand the system in general.
Thus, when people have any problem outside the very specific examples they’ve learnt, they can’t cope.
The next question is, obviously, why is computing education structured like this?
My theories:
A lot of education works like this. We generally believe far too much in rote learning. Rote learning is probably more suited to situations that don’t change too much, but is deployed in computing where the details you might rote learn are likely to change drastically in a relatively small number of years.
People don’t like thinking about computing. They want to do the minimum necessary to accomplish their non-computing task. However they make a falsely small estimate of the amount of computing knowledge required for this, and actually end up making their task more difficult.