[Edu-sig] Computer Hatred

[Alan James Salmoni]

Hello Shelley,

I am *really* sorry about not replying earlier - I think the original email
got buried under lots of others when my account was being slammed by the
latest worm.

I've done a little bit of thinking into this topic, but I don't think I can
shed too much light on what may be happening. I suppose to begin with, there
are a lot more users than there used to be - more people are finding that
they have to use computers, and instead of being curious about them, the
overall response may be one of boredom and uninterest perhaps?

Otherwise, in terms of most applications, complexity has been growing: with
every new release of an application, more functionality is added whether end
users need all the functions or not (and we rarely do - I think I've used
about 10% of Excels capabilities altogther in my own work!). This seems to
lead to more complex user interfaces, both in terms of the visual aspects
(lots more toolbars with lots more buttons, horrendously long and deep menu
structures), and also in terms of how a person uses the interface.

Just think how simple MacIntosh System 6 seems today, then remember it had to
do a lot less than say XP, OS X or Linux.

When experienced people are faced with a new application's interface, we only
have to assimilate the new aspects with which we are not familiar. I guess
with people learning computers for the first time, they are going to be faced
with the kind of interface that is just so complex and difficult to
understand, that it seems like an impossible task, a mountain of information
to learn before they can even begin to do anything useful.

I don't really have any evidence for this because I don't know if anyone has
done any investigation of it. If I had to make an explanation though, I would
say this: modern application interfaces are often intimidating to new users
in a way that people like us never had to experience.

It is possible that your students don't relate the "monster" of an
application with everyday tasks. It sounds like I'm recommending a book like
"fun with spreadsheets" or something which sounds horrendous, but there is an
easter egg in Excel which might make them relate to it more (it's a flight
simulator - not sure how to get to it, but Google seems a good place to try)

Short of making an application simple and straightforward looking (which is
probably not possible in this case), I don't see a way around this except by
introducing people to the computer world by using older and hopefully simpler
versions of the applications they will be trained to use. Then you could
gradually get them more used to the complex versions without being thrown in
at the deep end.

Hope this helps, but let me know if you have any questions.

Alan.

>In a message of Wed, 24 Sep 2003 15:03:53 BST, Shelley Walsh writes:
>I'm not looking for a statistical package. I am trying to discover such
>basic things as why it is so much easier to press 2+4= on a calculator than
>=2+4 in a spreadsheet. Or for that matter why typing 2+4 at a >>> prompt is
>so much harder than pressing 2+4= on a calculator. My experience was that
>students were even more violently against Python than they were against
>Excel. The ** drives for powers scares them even more than the ^ does.
>-- 
>Shelley Walsh
>shelley.walsh9 at ntlworld.com
>http://homepage.mac.com/shelleywalsh

I think the question you need to ask is 'what makes a calculator easy
to use'.  It may simply be that people are trained to use a calculator,
long before you meet them.  (How old are these students, anyway?)
Plenty of things are called 'intuitive' when all they actually are
is 'familiar'.  This makes measuring whether something is actually
'easy to use' vs 'you just know how to do it' a difficult problem for
Human Computer Interaction.  

Perhaps your user community is distinctly different from mine, but the
12 year old children in the computer club don't like '**' for power
because they are unfamiliar with that notation. (Some of them are
unfamiliar with the notion of exponentiation as well.)  Giving them a
page of 'pen and paper' math problems to solve, where they were asked
to use the ** notation made them familiar with it, which fixed that
problem.  The first year, I thought that 8 questions would be
sufficient for familiarity, but that proved not to be the case.  Next
year I used 20, and had no trouble.  It may be that your students need
more hands on training with computers to become more familiar with
loading and using programs in general, or certain programs in
particular.

Laura Creighton



=====
Alan James Salmoni
SalStat Statistics
http://salstat.sunsite.dk

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