Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
blog.joshorr.us
Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
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Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#2Interesting point, but the idea of learning excel is to learn computational thinking from an early age.
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#3Excel isn't just about "boring office tasks"! There's a whole website devoted to games built in excel: http://www.excelgames.com/ (my favorite is http://carywalkin.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/version-1-3-ar... )
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#4Spreadsheets are useful, and the school teaches them. So what? Schools also teach trigonometry, and most people never think about it again. Same with a lot of things.
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#5Interesting point, but the idea of learning excel is to learn computational thinking from an early age.
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Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#6When I was 11 Dad taught me how to use Excel to make a spreadsheet to compare the new minivans he was looking at buying (because I kept stealing his brochures and poring over the feature tables at the end). I later used it to make a chart showing how, compared to my brothers, I should have a later bedtime. Admittedly, I was a major nerd, and still didn't use Excel much, but I mention this to point out that kids can find uses for it.
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#7Excel's one of the first apps I learned to use and it's still a useful part of my toolbox to this day. It's incredibly powerful, and unlike so many modern web/iOS/android 'apps', it teaches you that the computer is your slave, instead of the other way around. You don't have to conform to the whims of some developer and bend your tasks to fit only what they anticipated.
You could certainly create a better spreadsheet than Excel and teach it to kids instead, but it's a great way to get started when it comes to understanding that computers exist to do your bidding and that you don't have to be afraid of numbers and data.
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#8Interesting point, but the idea of learning excel is to learn computational thinking from an early age.
I know - Excel is the bare-minimum introduction to "programming" that most folks get.
Honestly, I think the industry has failed a bit here - we haven't really provided a good substitute for the spreadsheet when it comes to letting complete non-coders do elaborate computational tasks. I mean, Octave is a great tool for scientists, and I've seen some fun graphing calculator apps... but for some reason Excel endures. A kid wants to graph a formula? They do it in excel, even though that means they have to find a way to provide all the X-coordinates.
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#9Spreadsheets...you know those rows and columns in databases? Yea why bother teaching them, no one uses SQL.
Re: Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?
#10Excel isn't just about "boring office tasks"! There's a whole website devoted to games built in excel: http://www.excelgames.com/ (my favorite is http://carywalkin.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/version-1-3-ar... )
True. That's probably not what they're teaching in schools though.