Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?

http://blog.joshorr.us/2013/10/why-hell-are-we-teaching-excel-to-11.html

by marmot1101 • 13 years ago

19 25 13 years ago

blog.joshorr.us

neuroguy• 13 years ago

Interesting point, but the idea of learning excel is to learn computational thinking from an early age.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

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.

Nzen• 13 years ago

Typically, Excel is a checkmark in 'computer skills' or to facilitate presenting tabular/graphed experiment data.

Color me surprised if the curriculum involves VBA or conditional formulas. Lego mindstorms might suit the OP in terms of creative And computational successor to hypercard.

nonchalance• 13 years ago

Excel 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... )

bello• 13 years ago

True. That's probably not what they're teaching in schools though.

mynameishere• 13 years ago

Spreadsheets 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.

BruceIV• 13 years ago

When 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.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

Excel'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.

ivanbrussik• 13 years ago

Spreadsheets...you know those rows and columns in databases? Yea why bother teaching them, no one uses SQL.

headcanon• 13 years ago

I remember learning how to use Excel when I was around that age, for the purpose of making charts for science projects. Since they're probably learning basic statistics and data analysis around that age, Excel is an effective way of figuring those things out, with tools they will likely have at home. With that said, I would prefer stuff like that be taught in the context of a larger project (like I did with the science fair project), rather than an end in and of itself. I also agree with the OP in that they should also be learning creative stuff as well during their computer lab time.

oddshocks2• 13 years ago

Why the Hell are we teaching garbage proprietary software to anyone?

ericcumbee• 13 years ago

I've never seen knowledge of Open Office as a required skill on a job listing.

oddshocks2• 13 years ago

I can't even fucking handle Hacker News

wellboy• 13 years ago

Who upvoted this?

eof2• 13 years ago

Why are we teaching thirteen year olds how to use the quadratic formula? Why are we teaching seventeen year olds how to do integrals or multiply matrices?

I mean, I am all for letting kids be kids, but if school was limited to what <insert age group> find's interesting, it would be nothing but gossip, sex, drugs, and video games.

jumpman44• 13 years ago

Are you really comparing Excel's place in computing to the Quadratic formula's place in mathematics?

eof2• 13 years ago

no, i am comparing excel's place in the life of a kid to the quadratic formula's

_-_-_-• 13 years ago

I taught my teenager days ago to use excel for sorting data to solve a math problem. It was a large set of data given in the problem, and it made no sense to do it by hand.

The problems that they give these days are either poorly thought out or just don't make sense to do without technological assistance. I think it is the former rather than the latter. Today's technology isn't needed to learn most of the concepts that are required to excel later in life, and my daughter is probably not going to be using pivot tables as an adult. I do think that word processing is a hell of a lot faster than having to do corrections with a typewriter, though. But the extra time having to think before you typed, or wrote for that matter, was a good thing. Today kids are being trained to just spit out online or in a text whatever comes into their head. That is going to be a disaster.

nwp90• 13 years ago

In case the author reads this - just FYI your site is being blocked by Fortiguard as "malicious". I'm guessing either your site has been compromised or something nasty has been served up by an ad network at some point (maybe now, maybe past).

wvenable• 13 years ago

When I was an elementary school student, we had a computer lab full of brand new IBM PS/2 and installed on them was the Microsoft Works suite.

This old version of Microsoft Works had a complete interactive tutorial on all the parts of the suite (Word processor, spreadsheet, database). A big part of our time learning computers was going through that tutorial. It was actually interesting and fun calculating numbers in the spreadsheet and advancing the tutorial.

To this day, my understanding of Excel comes from my time in that class. It's certainly not the worst class I had with computers in my lifetime.

nav1• 13 years ago

Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel To 11 Year Olds?

Probably because it's a rather useful skill to have. I can't think of a valid reason why teaching someone how to use Excel would be a bad thing (the author does not really provide one either). But large corporations use Excel, so we couldn't possibly allow kids to use it. What if they become accountants? Excellent article...

milesf• 13 years ago

Give kids Microsoft Excel and they'll find ways to have fun with it http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/microsoft-excel-artworks/

vacri• 13 years ago

Why the hell are we teaching kids how to use a hammer in Woodshop? After all, it's useless knowledge unless you become a carpenter, right, and how many people choose that as a career?

brudgers• 13 years ago

I showed my son Excel and he played with it over the next few days and showed his best friend - adding and dividing and multiplying lots of numbers at once was interesting for a while.

It's not that it replaced keepeeupee as recreation, but it probably changed the way he interprets the world a little bit because it came at a critical age.

teyc• 13 years ago

Here's an anectode in support of Excel. My 12 y.o. son was doing a project on seasons and climates, and he asked me whether it rains more in cold weather. And he gave me a certain line of reasoning.

Since real teaching moments can be hard to come by, I suggested we not stop there, but look at the data. Climate information is readily available on the internet, and we used Excel to plot out whether there were correlations.

Excel on its own has little value, but as a tool, it can make analysis painless and encourage people to form hypothesis and check them out quickly.

Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds?

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