What they forgot to teach you about computers
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Why “What they forgot”?
Most students grew up with the presence of digital technology and are thought to be comfortable with, and fluent in, technology. But for many, this fluency is with using tablets and smart phones and these are different to computers. Several studies have shown that the increased reliance on of tablets and smartphones makes people highly proficient at online communication but hampers the development of other computing skills Drossel and Eickelmann (2017); Australian Curriculum and Authority (2015).
This chapter tries to teach the computer skills that you might have missed if you have used mainly the mobile devices. I focus on the knowledge gaps that often appear when people are learning computational data analysis. Primarily these are to do with finding and organising their files and folders in the file systems.
If you often use a computer for tasks like organising files and writing documents and spreadsheets much of this chapter might be familiar. However, if you have mainly used your mobile phone and tablets to access the internet then reading all of it will be helpful. The first chapter briefly explains why a computer rather than a tablet is most useful for a science degree and what an operating system is. The second chapter some essential concept for scientific computers: file system organisation, file types, working directories and paths. Most people joining a bioscience degree programme are not familiar with the concept of working directories but will find learning data analysis much easier once they pick up this knowledge.