Do you feel it's important for younger generations to be able to read an analog clock? If so why?

In My Humble Opinion
261

And we have clock-face representations on, for example, “Back At” signs and movie montages showing the passage of time. But neither clock faces nor arrows show up as replacements for numbers and words in conventional written text, which is what you seemed to be complaining about at the original position of your goalposts.

If what you’re trying to say is that arrows show up in more kinds of visual symbol systems because they’re simpler and more fundamental symbols than clock faces, well, duh. That doesn’t automatically make the clock-face layout pointless or useless, any more than it makes a similarly specialized layout like a speedometer dial pointless or useless.

262

I think this is a great analysis. I’m less convinced by others that the answer to the second question is a definite yes, but folks have raised very good arguments. I’m still convinced that the answer to the first is a no.

263

Don’t know about you, but I will regularly say things like “I’m half an hour late, I’ll be there at quarter to six”, rather than '“I’m 30 minutes late and I’ll be there at 5:45”.

264

They’re round for the same reason as clocks: ease of manufacture. Notice as we’ve gone to digital timers, they didn’t ape the interface of mechanical timers. Instead, digital timers overwhelmingly have a digital countdown display with buttons to set the time.

You’re correct here. This is a counterexample to my broad claim. In this instance, we do naturally defer back to the clockface as a natural communication interface. But the nicheness of this example and that we’re unable to come up with other similar examples indicates to me that the value is extremely circumscribed.

That we have other interfaces that mimic some of the form is a completely separate discussion. It’s possible that this is the correct way to display altimetric ratings (although I strongly prefer conventional digital displays because it’s far faster to find the highest order value) but that has no bearing on whether this is the correct way to display time.

Yes, I agree that linear displays of time is a natural metaphor that we arrive at again and again. Notably, both written and day-calendar displays of time both naturally allow you to report point sources of time (12:45pm) and durations of time (45 minutes) which is something the clockface interface can’t provide. There’s no way to indicate an arbitrary 45 minute span on a clockface whereas it’s trivial on a calendar/gantt chart.

If we were unburdened by mechanical complexity at the start of the timekeeping era, we probably would have come up with something similar to digital clocks and day-calendars but not analog clocks. Notice how children don’t need to be taught to read a day-calendar, the interpretation of how blocks map onto times is far more intuitive to grasp.

265

It’s relevant to this discussion when you claimed that “… in the entire history of mechanical clocks, we’ve never found it useful it enough to naturally adopt anywhere else” and that the concept was “arbitrary” and “complicated”. That altimeter follows exactly the same design concept and is trivially easy to read at a glance. The little hand at 4 and the big hand at 0 means 4000 ft. One can also see that the thin “10,000” ft pointer has moved two spaces out of five over towards “1”. 2/5 is 4/10, so it’s 40% of the way to 10,000, so 4000 ft.

266

Precisely because it is cheap, beginning in the LED era. Ironically the mechanical ones, and imitation of the mechanical ones, is the more expensive option now.

It sort of parallels a discussion we have had in another thread about car UIs - why so much touchscreen, and the actual user experience superiority of buttons and knobs.

267

Aesthetics matter to me. We have a large outdoor decorative clock, with temp and humidity gauges as well. I can check the time from quite far away, which is nice. Digital, sure, be fine but look ugly IMHO.
My employers are clock collectors, (I’m not) so we have some interesting specimens here. (The Secret Of Life With Independent Watchmaker David Walter: Watches, Clocks, And DeeDee’s Tourbillon - Quill & Pad)
In my work as a handy person, I do find the terms clockwise and anticlockwise really invaluable. Nuts and bolts and upside down problems with multiple people needing instructions need these terms.
I also have digital clocks all over the place, and use my phone to set timers and alarms.

PS David Walters is a really neat guy, he lives near Solvang, in Santa Barbara county, originally from Australia…so I get to interact with him a fair amount. “Do we need the car jack to break that free again, David?” True story

268

Nope, unlikely. Because “the start of the timekeeping era” back in prehistory was directly engaged with circular visualizations of the passage of time. Early timekeepers were watching the shadow of a stick sweep around the directions, and watching the stars circle around the celestial pole.

Modern technologies using mechanical or other kinds of oscillators to count uniform time-units without regard to their astronomical origins have given modern clock-readers the impression that time is merely a linear sequence. But any human society (in an orbital planetary system, at least) developing timekeeping methods ab initio would almost certainly manifest this same basic principle of the passage of time involving rotation.

They don’t? Sure they do. The columnar/cyclic scale of Sunday → Saturday, superimposed on the linear scale of the day-of-month progression, is not self-explanatory. (The continuance of the weekday scale combined with the rollover of the date counter when transitioning between months is something that particularly tends to trip up little kids encountering calendars, IME.)

269

Not to mention the calendar week starting on Sunday when the “real” week starts on Monday.

270

Yes, the cheapest option will always get a lot of use. And right now, digital timers are far cheaper than anything else.

271

Almost everyone is a bad proofreader of their own work. Most of us here are clever enough to suss out what others meant to say, and many of us are charmed by the accidental poetry, bad puns or serendipitous insights generated by the occasional spell-check hiccup.

272

The Macintosh computer when displaying a text listing of a directory uses a pie-chart symbol in line with the text as an indicator of a file that is still downloading, and updates the pie-chart until it is complete. I will admit the the textual file listing is not conventional narrative text, never mind fine literature [though there is a subset of geeks who delight in naming files so that the listings produce haiku or even sonnets…]

273

That really depends on individual experience. Most schedules I’ve encountered look something like this

3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. NMUN Conference Registration

3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Optional Delegate NMUN Rules Q&A

4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Opportunity Fair

I’m not even 100% sure what you mean by a schedule written as a bar chart. Are you talking sbout something like the scheduling assistant in Outlook, where I can sort of see the schedule of everyone I want to invite for a meeting and I need to look for a slot where the most people are “available” ? That’s about the only place I’ve seen that sort of schedule.

As far as kids learning to read an analog clock, I don’t really have an opinion as to whether the process of learning it is worthwhile. But I’m sure that the usefulness decreases day by day. There’s one analog clock in my house, and it’s really there for decor. But there are lots of items that display digital time. The analog clocks where I worked have been broken for years - no point getting them fixed when everyone has a cell phone, desk phone and/or a computer screen displaying the time digitally. Same thing for clocks on the street - they either stopped and haven’t been fixed or they been removed. There’s the occasional bank that has put a digital clock on the facade.

274

Thanks for the interesting observation. I agree with you - tho I assume someone will post a non-analog clock they find attractive. Taste is very open to dispute. I won’t go so far as to say schools ought to teach “elegance” or “culture”, but I’m not sure the idea terribly offends me.

Technology is wonderful in many respects. But I also think it worthwhile to teach children an awareness of the natural progression of time - within the artificial constructs we have formed around it (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years…). Just because technology has come up with displays that can substitute for an analog clock or a monthly/yearly calendar, I have not yet heard an argument that convinces me that an average chile is disadvantaged by being exposed to such devices in school.

275

I’m inclined to agree with you. There are educators participating here that know far more about this stuff than I do, but FWIW, here’s a bunch of reasons culled from a variety of different sites (not necessarily authoritative, but plausible) about why there are educational and cognitive development benefits associated with learning to tell time on analog clocks:

  • Visualizing Time Passage: Unlike digital, analog clocks show time as a continuous, cyclical, and moving concept, making it easier to visualize “how much time is left”.
  • Mathematical Skills:
    • Skip-Counting: Reading minutes (5, 10, 15…) facilitates skip-counting, which is foundational for multiplication.
    • Fractions: The clock face is an excellent tool for teaching halves, quarters, and fourths.
    • Elapsed Time: Calculating the duration between two points is more intuitive on a clock face.
  • Spatial Reasoning: Interpreting the angle and position of the hands develops spatial awareness and geometric reasoning.
  • Cognitive Development: The process engages visual perception, memory, and executive functioning.

I’m inclined to agree with this reasoning. As for the time and difficulty of teaching kids to read analog clock faces, as you mention first grade I wonder if part of the problem is that it’s just too early. According to what I’ve been able to find, full mastery of analog clocks (being able to tell time within 5 minutes, understanding concepts like quarter hours, etc) may not occur until age 7 to 8, which means second to third grade, not first.

ISTM that at that age, you could probably demonstrate key concepts with a large clock face where the teacher could move the minute hand, and the hour hand was geared to move accordingly, so the child could grasp the key concept of how a full rotation of the minute hand moves the hour hand from one number to the next.

I can’t help but think that mental exercises like this help to build cognitive skills, though there may be better and more effective ones that educators may prefer.

276

That’s a month calendar and I agree they actually take some getting used to. A day calendar simply has a single column going from the start of the day downward to the end of the day with blocks representing events happening during the day.

277

But when a physical metaphor is useful, you do see it replicated in a digital realm even at additional expense. Eg: for cars/stereos, the cheapest UI for volume is a vol+ and vol- button but some interfaces spend the extra money on a digital rotary encoder because we do find use from a rotary interface for volume.

With microwaves, we see an extreme minority of microwaves bother to replicate using a dial to set time and temperature (I know because I owned one a decade ago and it was one of the only models on the market) but we overwhelmingly see a consumer preference for typing in the digits on a keypad or using a mechanical dial timer on the extreme low end of the market. If there were more consumer demand, we’d see higher end microwaves also come with dial style interfaces.

278

My high end Hitachi oven / microwave comes with a dial style interface. We bought it three years ago and there were quite a few with dials.

279

I am a software engineer, and they mystify me.

And I have been involved in numerous projects, including one that required our team hooking up to a Google Sheets instance via their API to give reasonably real-time data on a variety of customer-affecting events (eg, a car crashed into one real world store, so no deliveries were possible from that store), so someone had to pull their available product cataloging while the police investigation and subsequent repairs happened.

I totally get SQL - I can do gymnastics with data, and I am good with NoSQL databases, too.

But Excel is beyond my ken.

I mean, this (stolen from Reddit) is an absolute eyesore, but i struggle with things way way more simple:

I could have done that in SQL in less than half the lines of code, I think. (Not that I have tried to do so)

280

Heh! By fifth grade, we’re more talking =sum(A2:A16), which is impressive enough. Complex coding isn’t what I’m talking about. The majority of people I know whose jobs include office components use spreadsheets on a daily basis, but on a level to complete simple analyses and create simple charts, not the sort of deeper coding you’re describing. I want kids to learn this basic functionality and use it in science class.