To the a young learner in 2015, files, documents, menus, and applications mean something completely different than a child in 1980. The aforementioned terms were real physical things that were used to describe a world of signal flow and binary code. Children have grown up in a world where the concept has more meaning and understanding that a physical document in a file in an office. We have to understand this when interacting with our children. We essentially have to "teach backwards" from how we learned and were taught.
My first epiphany with this was at an observational round at Standard Middle School in Oildale, CA. The teacher was in front of the class trying to work out a math problem to graph it. Students had already graphed the equation and were working out the formula to confirm the concept they were seeing on their Chromebook. That hit home for me. It reminded me of when I was a Fire Direction Officer in the army performing rudimentary Rocket Science (Gunnery). Until I was actually managing a database and able to conceptualize engaging targets in a 3 dimensional world, the step action drill of computing data was nothing more than plying my vocational craft. To see the nuances of terrain, wind, and the ballistics of a firing tube, the abstract concepts of the math did not resonate. Children master this understand from birth! The ability to understand a virtual world that isn't even there is more understood than abstract theorems and formulas. We need to review how the modern day student learns.
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