Resolved: Students should learn about data management, collection, analysis, and effective communication of data in various formats. Further the fundamentals of these skills should be started in age appropriate ways in the primary grades, and build on the skills through High School. Spreadsheets are one tool of that goal.
My WAG is that the big push over the next several years will need to become implementation of AI tools to organize and create and to query the datasets, teaching students to understand what they need to get the AI to produce, why, and to query it in the most useful ways. Spreadsheets may be a portion of that. But the bigger job is recognizing garbage in and faulty analysis.
AI in this way is what calculators were to some of us in High School, and computers with Word to my kids. Again this is not decades. The AI tools are already built into Excel and Google products, and Claude 3 is supposedly amazing at handling data in various formats, including but not limited to creation and analysis of spreadsheets.
Back to learning clocks reading in early grades … about time maybe?
As Kimstu notes, reference to spreadsheets as something new that needs to be incorporated into the curricula may have confused me.
I wonder if I was ever taught how to read baseball box scores or player’s stats on the back of trading cards? Aren’t those a form of spreadsheet? Sure, I assume schools will teach kids how to make various forms of charts - which requires that they look at the rows and the columns. Pretty related to outlining a paper or reading/compiling a table of contents. And a close relative to graphs, bar/pie charts…
Thanks for reminding me of the horror that was Fortran punchcard decks! And I recall “debit left, credit right” from my accounting classes. But I imagine that might have referred to “ledgers” instead of spreadsheets. Is there a difference? I looked up “spreadsheet” and the first definitions seem to consistently refer to digital records. Is there something about digital records that needs to be taught? If spreadsheets are primarily digital, then I do not think it a horrible misreading to suspect one is referencing the most common software used to compile them.
My wife teaches Business Law at a community college. She constantly struggles to get her students to access primary sources, even if she provides them the specific address. But instead of opening a statute or regulation and reading it to get the answer, the fucking idiots instead simply type or speak into AI, and then hand in some nonsensical hallucinated answer.
The 4th grade teacher I spoke with yesterday said up to 1/2 of her students in a middl-upper middle class suburb could not read an analog clock.
I’m reminded of a book I read about Francis Beaufort, extolling the value of observing your surroundings. (Something I agree is of great value.) A professor described asking a roomful of students the length of a lunar cycle. He gave them various information including the earth and moon’s diameter, rotation, etc. The students all set to calculating and the professor observed (paraphrased), “Why do you need to calculate this. You have been alive for 15-20 years, and the moon has been a constant in the night sky. You’ve seen the moon go through its phases over and over. This is something you should just KNOW.”
All this talk about spreadsheets reminds me that Keith Devlin gave spreadsheets as an example of why it’s important to learn algebra and think algebraically, back in 2011.
Funny you should mention that - my family got our first computer - an Apple IIGS - when I was in 2nd grade. I was fascinated by every aspect of it; I was even happy to help Dad type stuff into Quicken because it was a chance to type on the computer. One of my favorite things was the tutorial software, which included a segment with basic instructions on how to use a spreadsheet. It didn’t include any serious lessons regarding formulas, but I picked up enough that I was very comfortable with spreadsheets when I started using them years later.
And I recall “debit left, credit right” from my accounting classes. But I imagine that might have referred to “ledgers” instead of spreadsheets. Is there a difference? I looked up “spreadsheet” and the first definitions seem to consistently refer to digital records. Is there something about digital records that needs to be taught? If spreadsheets are primarily digital, then I do not think it a horrible misreading to suspect one is referencing the most common software used to compile them.