Gen-X here with 2 Gen-Z kids. I developed my typing skills playing MUDS in the early 90’s. My kids are….ok….at typing, and despite my guidance over the years, are really bad at troubleshooting though when something goes wrong. It should “just work” to them. If it doesn’t, then the solution is to replace it.
However, I WILL SAY…my typing speed is about 100-110 WPM on a keyboard, and that my daughter could probably match that speed typing on her phone.
They are not tech-savvy, we had to dumb down technology so boomers and gen Z’ers could use it.
Well, we dumbed it down for the boomers, but never trained the kids.
Because they didn’t need training. Or that’s what we all thought. They were born with an internet that was basically Google. We needed to learn command line, they needed to learn how to press one button.
And it really is that way… Until they need to do something more complex and realize they can’t.
We made the world better, but forgot to document the process.
// Documentation is important.
Removed by mod
My sister is gen x and I’m a millennial, she’s asks me the most batshit insane questions like, how do I turn off my iPhone? What? You’ve had it 4 years!
X, especially older ones, are only tech savy if they were nerds. After that technology became a more everyday thing so maybe millenial has the magic spot where it was common but not dumbed down. I dunno though.
The article is kind of all over the place mixing high-school graduates and fourth-graders? I can see how you’re sluggish at typing in fourth grade… The numbers for a 17 year old would be interesting… But yeah, 13 words per minute isn’t impressive. And most young people I know use phones and tablets, not computers. So naturally a good amount of them isn’t good around these things.
13 words per minute isn’t impressive
Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)
On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.
That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.
so… people who take typing lessons and actively try to improve it have better typing skills than the ones who don’t. Shocking.
I’m the oldest of Gen z (early 1990s). I have two younger siblings who are also Gen Z. Typing was a skill we learned in middleschool/ elementary. When I was about 8, we learned how to use google because it was considered a great resource to find information. By the time my middle sibling was in similar classes, they moved away from Google due to NSFW search results. When my youngest sibling was in school, they worried about shock sites.
They’ve slowly been removing computers from the school curriculum because of fear of outside forces. That includes typing, sadly. This is all coming from someone who grew up in a Plato self self education plan. (Online, self studies)
Gen Z started in 97, IIRC
I said the opposite of what I meant, my bad. I didn’t want to doxx myself and I tripped up.
Sorry, but if you were born in the early 90s, you’re not Gen Z, you’re a millennial. The general cutoff for Gen Z is usually agreed to be about 1997.
I meant to say late. Are you gen z and getting old aswell?
Outside forces, like challenging their teaching?
They can still google dicks at home.
It was more the dicks showing up in class unprompted. Then, it was people sharing links to shock sites. Now we have to worry about people stealing information. That was always a thing, it’s just a lot more common now.
Remember those two girls who only had one cup? I found out about them in class from a dick. It ended as expected. 🤮
That feels like too far in the other direction. Rather than open internet access, there should be a district-wide intranet or at least just a proper whitelist of allowed sites, but of course that would require a proper IT department and would be too costly for most schools.
Duh. They use phones mostly. A lot of the gen z people I know are just as bad as boomers with tech. Millennials and gen x had that sweet spot of “actually having to learn how shit works not just iphone go brrr.”
Yeah I don’t know why the article mentions Gen Z’s “tech-savvy reputation”. Being able to operate a cell phone doesn’t make you tech savvy.
Gen X and Millennials grew up using command line and troubleshooting computer problems before the Internet. Their tech skills are way higher than Gen Z.
Thats largely because 90s software was jank, and the internet exposed all kinds of more jank and viruses… but now, most things just work. Also, most people arent really using desktops, they’re using phones or tablets or game consoles, where the OS is very much locked down.
The average user experience has abstracted away understanding how things actually work.
Being able to operate a cell phone doesn’t make you tech savvy
it does, to a boomer
I never needed to use command line, but I did hone NY typing skills on MIRC and ICQ.
*Mavis Beacon.
Anyone responsible for the family IT services had to learn cmd.
I’m thankful my father was so insistent on teaching me to type properly. At the time I was super annoyed at him putting a cardboard cutout over the keyboard so I couldn’t see keys. But touch typing has been a boon ever since, I doubt dad was prepping me for typing quickly mid-game but it sure is nice!
My dad was similar. Guess thats a good thing looking back. I’m going to teach my kid pivot tables so they can rule the world.
I learned mine playing a MUD
You typed fast or you died.
For me it was WoW back when it was more social and you had to communicate via text mid fights and whatnot
This is why I feel disconnected from most of my gen z people
They also stopped teaching typing in schools. My younger family members never had an computer class or a typing class.
I’m early gen z (mid-twenties now), I’ve have had a touch-screen phone since I was 13, but somehow I am still awful at typing on it. I don’t understand how this is a skill people are actually good at. Here’s typing test I just did on my phone (the monkeytype website). Look at all those errors, and I was actually trying to do good.
I know people who will write entire emails from their phone and I just don’t understand how. I’ve literally written texts on my computer, and then copied it to my phone to send instead of typing on the touch screen.
In comparison, on my computer with my lovely low-profile mechanical keyboard.
One difference is that the touch-screen typists rely heavily on autocorrect. I don’t think they’re actually as accurate as you think - their spelling and typo errors are being covered up more than yours on the desktop computer.
Anything beyond ~2002 became worse than the predecessor in IT related tasks.
Yep. And phone typing is the ‘hunt and peck’ method of keyboard typing. Which is unfortunate because it’s ingraining the slowest way to type onto a whole generation.
Swipe keyboards are way more efficient, try it out of you have time.
Autocorrect begs to differ, usually only when the word is out of my field of vision.
I took typing, on typewriters, but got efficient years later on IRC and ICQ. 60+more wpm. I’m still fairly proficient on a familiar KB too.
any good IRC servers left or did it all move to discord? Ive been meaning to get on an IRC server thats not just a mirror of the in-game chat of the game I play.
Gen Z here, most of my online life is on IRC. Learned about its existence a couple years ago. It is very much alive, although most people left there are at least semi-technical, and I miss the non-technical crowd.
I don’t know, it was a very long time ago. Maybe do a search, based on your interests?
Slashnet still exists and it’s fairly active depending on the channel. #xkcd was bumping last time I checked my client.
Can confirm, it’s worth the effort.
Tried using swipe typing before and honestly I’m just faster typing normally.
Yeah, autocorrect is bad enough without the extra emphasis on it with swipe.
It’s vastly better when you need to type with one hand
It works well for casual conversation. But if you’re trying to have a technical conversation it will fail on uncommon or custom words or phrases.
There’s a mode where you swipe your finger over each letter in order and it auto completes the word. Not sure how often younger people use it (though I wasn’t aware you could do that until I saw someone younger doing it).
Sounds like predictive T9 but slower
T9 was supreme.
No it’s actually way faster. You can swipe whole words in less than a second. It’s like writing with pen and paper but each letter is actually a whole word.
Yeah, I’m a swiper myself and I can’t imagine anyone being able to swipe without knowing the keyboard layout like one would for typing.
A swiping motion and muscle memory for tapping are two different things. It took a while to get fast with my thumbs even though I type fairly fast on a keyboard.
Tech has evolved to intentionally give less and less choice to the user. Tech skills have declined on average as a result.
As others highlighted this is not surprising given that Gen Z uses phones a lot more than computers, and writing in one is completely different than in the other.
[Discussion from multiple comments ITT] It’s also damn slower to write in a phone screen, simply because it’s smaller - you need a bit more precision to hit the keys, and there’s no room to use all the fingers (unlike in a physical keyboard).
Swiping helps, but it brings up its own problems - the keyboard application needs to “guess” what you’re typing, and correcting mistakes consumes time; you need to look at the word being “guessed” instead of either the keyboard or the text being written, so your accuracy goes down (increasing the odds of wrong “guesses”); and eventually you need to tap write a few words anyway, so you’re basically required to type well two ways instead of just one to get any semblance of speed.
Test their typing skills on a smartphone.
I used to have an average typing speed of 120wpm but I haven’t touched a physical keyboard in hella long. I can type about that fast on my phone now, tho.
Test their typing skills on a smartphone without autocorrect.
I’d be faster without autocorrect than with. I feel like it chooses the wrong word more often than not.
Honestly, I miss the real keyboard from my 2009 Blackberry. No substitute for haptic feedback.
Those tiny physical qwerty keyboards were perfect. I often wish we could get that back, purely for typing accuracy.
I mean, as a millennial, I mostly taught myself to type. I’m fast enough, but have bad technique and could be faster. I was only ever actually trained to type in grade school, and barely. Once in a while in computer class we would play an educational typing game.
My mom is much better at typing than I am, because she was trained to type in college. That’s not really a thing anymore.
I had typing tutor software on the family PC. It made the mistake of trying to teach typing by starting with only home row keys, then expanding outward from there. So for a very long time, you would type things like adj daf jal ls; dal fka and so forth. It was a very long time until you really started to get it.
And then MSN chat rooms and messenger happened to me, and suddenly touch typing was the main way I had to hit on chicks. I knew what the home row was, so I knew what touch typing looked like, so I started actually doing it, but typing things I wanted to type. I’m now the third fastest typist I know. On a good keyboard with a passage I’m familiar with I can key 106WPM, right now typing conversationally out of my brain I’m probably hitting about 65 or 70.
I learned by playing StarCraft on 56k modem. VoIP was not possible so you had to type fast. Style is wildly non-standard but i was typing fast enough not to see a benefit from standard style.
I taught a bunch of Gen Zers back when they were in high school. None of them knew how to type well, and it was a rarity that any of them knew how to type at all. I was supposed to teach them things like Microsoft Office, but we had to start with typing and basic PC usage before we could move on to something as complicated as MS Word.
This is what happens when people don’t use computers and instead just use cell phones.
And Chromebooks. All the schools pretty much use Chromebooks, at least in my region
It’s pretty messed up that schools enforce those things onto kids. Chromebooks, while cheap, invade the hell out of your privacy and are extremely restrictive. We should be teaching kids GNU/Linux, not ChromeOS… I honestly feel sorry for the future of free software. Students aren’t taught ethics, freedom, or privacy at ALL. I was in school, (graduated two years ago), and it seemed that every teacher adapted the “you don’t have privacy” motto. Absolutely terrible. Buy the kids a Dell Latitude E6400 and put Libreboot/Trisquel with KDE on it. Let them live and help each other out with issues. It would be super heart warming to see schools adapt something like this instead.
(I understand the convenience issues, but we should start adapting, its crazy that Gen Z barely know anything about computers)
We’re not even teaching them cursive anymore and they still can’t type? What are they doing in schools?
Gen alpha is learning cursive. Gen z is all highschool and college now.
-worked in a k-8 tutoring program for 2 years.
I thought Gen Alpha was very explicitly NOT learning cursive.
Idk what to tell you. This is also a public school, and not a private school.
Good to know because the gen zer at work said she never learned it. So it may be up to each school district.
I’m also gen z and I learned it. I’m also 24.
As a Gen Z - cursive is very much still taught in first grade, and not like you can forget it either because most school assignments are required in paper form, same for lecture notes. You’re not writing this much and this fast without cursive.
