It’s been just over fours years since I started mentoring high school students at work, and I recently began mentoring my fourth such student. That’s enough students for me to start observing patterns. Of course, each arrives with different computer knowledge and experience, but there have been two consistent and alarming gaps. One is a concept and the other is a skill, both of which I expect an advanced high schooler, especially one interested in computers, to have before they arrive. This gap persists despite students taking computer classes at school.
File, Directories, and Paths
The vital gap in concepts is files, directories, or, broadly speaking, paths. Students do initially arrive with a basic notion of files and directories (i.e. “folders”) and maybe some rough idea that there’s a hierarchy to it all. But they’ve never learned the notation: a location to a file specified by a sequence of directory components which may be either relative or absolute. More specifically, they’ve never been exposed to the concepts of . (current directory) nor .. (parent directory).