Problems with students stuck in web-browser and what to do about it

Question

My students have been trained to use tools in the web-browser: cloud word-processors, web-sites, etc.

When I try to teach programming on the computer: using programs that are on the local computer. They find it difficult.

I do a demo. I then show the class one step at a time, what to do.

• Close web-browser.
• Go to start menu, and open xyz program.

As I look around the room, one or two students at this step re-open the web-browser, and start attempting to follow the instructions there.

What can I do about this? In terms of:

• Mitigation: what can I do to improve my instruction?
• Prevention: what can I do in the years leading up to this? Will it help?

---

Age: Key-stage 3 — Year 7 to 9 — age 11 → 14. I am encountering the problem in Year 9.

Answer 1

In terms of instruction, especially at the beginning, I find it helpful to ask my students why I'm doing something at every step while demonstrating:

1. I'm going to open the start menu, why am I going to do that?
2. I'm going to click xyz program, why am I going to do that?

Sometimes that leads down a rabbit hole of explanation, but ultimately it serves several purposes:

• if nobody knows the answer as to why I'm doing it then I know it's something that requires more explanation
• if somebody knows the "wrong" information then it's a chance to correct it
• if somebody knows the correct answer it gets said out loud for all the other students to hear

This approach has really helped me to address problems that I wouldn't have otherwise discovered, as it forces me to slow down on a task that I could normally just fly through, and I get immediate feedback every step of the way.

---

I also like to use categorisation exercises. The students I work with are older, but with that group I find that many of my students do use desktop applications in their personal computer usage. I also find that 99% of the desktop applications they use are video games, but for a simple prompt like:

"What do you do on your computer?"

with hypothetical answers like:

• "Watch YouTube/Netflix"
• "Play League of Legends"
• "Play VALORANT"
• "TikTok/Instagram"

Could be put into categories like:

Web Applications	Mobile Applications	Desktop Application
YouTube	TikTok	League of Legends
Netflix	Instagram	VALORANT

Now, not everything can be categorised 100% neatly, but this type of activity can help to provide a frame of reference built upon the things they already use/are familiar with. Then you can put any future Desktop Applications that you're going to use in class into the "Desktop Application" column. This can help to solidify why the desktop application is not online even if the understanding is limited to "because it's the same way I open X game".

---

In terms of prevention, it can be very helpful to determine the initial source of misunderstanding or misinformation.

People who interact with computers for a living often use (and talk about) computers differently than the "average" person. I have found many schools choose to move to a singular technology (because software is expensive). The potential exists that a lot of these students are learning how to interact with these programs from instructors who also don't understand the differences themselves.

For example, we moved from the desktop application versions of the Microsoft Suite (like Microsoft Word) to Microsoft Office 365 several years ago. However, many of the non-computer faculty are still telling students "Open up Microsoft Word" by which they currently mean:

1. Open up a web browser
2. Log into your Student Account
3. Go to the Microsoft Office 365 Link
4. Choose Word from the list of Virtual Applications
5. Create a new document

Beyond this, many of these courses are entirely contained within a web browser (read: there is no reason to open any other desktop application to complete all of the work for the course). This sometimes results in faculty telling their students things along the lines of "You never need to open anything other than Chrome" (the web browser that is default on the student machines).

Our student work stations are configured to empty various folders on log out. So students need to have their work saved to their cloud storage not on the device itself. Because of this, many of my students are initially uncomfortable having files local to the machine (even temporarily) because they've been repeatedly taught that anything they save to the computer will be lost if it's not in cloud storage.

I say all of this, not to push the issue onto other departments/teachers, but rather that it is useful to know what misinformation the students have. It's good to know if there are students in the classroom who:

• believe they are going to get in trouble for exploring other parts of the computer than the web browser
• believe that opening the Office365 Word web application through their browser is what it means to open a desktop application
• believe that they should never save something to the computer itself for fear of losing it

If you can determine exactly why opening the web browser is the default action for your students you will have an easier time in correcting the behaviour. In my experience, for some students it has been as simple as saying, "I know this is different than most of your classes, but in here you're allowed to do x, y, and z. If you break it we'll figure out how to fix it."

Answer 2

I (thankfully) haven't had the problem you mention quite to the degree that you are having it, but I am seeing more and more of this issue with my students generally.

My focus in this answer is practical: what you might actually do with your students.

Instructionally, you've already found the weakness: they are unaware of where their computer ends, where the internet begins, and how an individual computer is partitioned and organized into "files" and "directories".

So, my explanation to students would begin exactly there:

Hey folks, I know that all of our computers are connected to the internet, and we use apps, and some of them are on the internet, and some of them are on our computer, and some of them are some kind of mix.

The problem is that it's really hard to tell where things are. Today, we're going to focus on that, and in particular, we're going to talk about how the computer in front of you is organized. It's actually a pretty simple system, but you're forgiven for not knowing. Our modern computer ecosystem, with everything on the cloud, and phones organized into some kind of "apps" view, can make it very hard to see.

So, the first thing I'm going to do is ask you to disconnect from the wifi. Get off the internet. It feels funny, right? Don't worry, you won't get hurt, and we'll all go back on in a few minutes.

Is everyone off? Excellent. Now, you're looking at your computer, all by itself. Are there still files on there? Of course there are. Let's take a bit of a look ...

What follows is a bit of a guided lesson on the idea of a root directory, sub directories, files, and the organizing principle that directories allow us to group things together, and sub-directories allow us to group together sub-groups of that stuff, and sub-sub-directories allow us ... and so on and so forth, fractally.

Depending on the level of your students, I might steer clear of a command prompt for the first few minutes, or even for the first day. Let them get used to finding things using the mouse and the system GUI before entering into a CLI. The GUI allows them to see, and that is a big advantage right now.

Also, emphasize the why of it all at every step. Why are things in directories? Why are some directories in other directories? How does this help to organize the computer internally? How does this help organize the student on the computer?

After you've done directories and files, and come back around to the CLI equivalents, I'd connect back to the internet and talk briefly about the idea of a URL as something that answered the central problem at the beginning of the internet: how can a computer find something that's NOT in its own directories? The internet was built around getting to files, just like our directory structure!

I wouldn't dwell here, explore it in any real depth, or expand on it much. My goal, having already talked about directory heirarchies, would be to make Very Firm the distinction between here and elsewhere, and to make clear that all of it comes down to files, and how we can organize files so that they can be found.

Answer 3

I think your students may have more experience with smartphones than with computers. So if you can explain it in cell phone terms, it may make more sense to them. The Start Menu is like the app drawer. The desktop is like the home screen. The taskbar is like swapping apps. Win+D is a shortcut to get to the desktop, like tapping the Home icon/dot/button on a phone.

And if you can reduce steps, that will help as well. I suggest a permanent icon on the desktop, so this can be two steps: 1) Use Win+D to get to the Desktop (home screen). 2) Double click on the icon to launch the application.

This doesn't solve the long term issues of having no idea how computers work, but exposure over time will at least help with that.

Answer 4

You say:

Go to start menu, and...

One thing I've noticed is that using the Microsoft Start menu is a bit odd. There is the Search box, but I always switch that off because it takes up space and isn't needed. You can and should literally click the icon then just start typing 'excel' or whatever. Yes, even though it looks like there is no place to type. This makes people's eyes cross and usually they refuse to do it.

I basically don't use desktop shortcuts / icons anymore, I just type. I don't use menus or try to find anything in the system screens. So learning to type letters on nothing is unintuitive, but it's the Way.

Similarly I gave up keeping bookmarks / favorites in the browser. I type a few letters and browser history shows it. In my workplace directory, 3 letters of someone's last name finds them.

I gave in to the Microsoft default folder names long ago. I still don't like the Library concept though.

So I just wonder if you lost your students at hello, er... Start?

Answer 5

Start them with a command-line-only OS (on a real personal computer). It gives them enough mental separation. Then you can approach things from below.

Also, teach them the basics of computing first, before teaching them programming. Including the inner-platform effect (the software design anti-pattern that modern browsers are based on).

Remember: They are clearly not computer users and only ever used fixed-function appliances that just happened to be implemented using a computer (which they never accessed or even could access). You’re basically surprised why a car driver opens the car door instead of getting below the car.

Finally, if you meet a stubborn web disciple (like from the church of WhatWG), just point them to https://copy.sh/v86/. Preferably as a link that boots an image where Chrome is set to autostart, with the same link you just gave them set as the homepage. :D

Answer 6

As for your purpose - teaching to write programs, I would say, switch to a web based dev environment like repl.it. This will allow your students to start making programs and learning your curriculum. This should solve the immediate issue at hand.

On to the "browser mindset," and a long term fix, it sounds like there has been a major missing piece of instruction leading up your class. I would guess there was no instruction on how to use a general purpose computer, (or at the very least, how to use Windows.) Coving this topic would allow the children to understand that computers are used for more than just accessing the internet to consume content - something a few adults I know need help with.

Answer 7

When I try to teach programming on the computer: using programs that are on the local computer. They find it difficult.

Then don't! I mean, knowing how to use programs on the local computer is certainly worthwhile, but if you're teaching them programming and they're "stuck" in a web browser, teach them how to code within a web browser.

I find http://gitpod.io (which is available for free) immensely useful (don't worry, you don't actually need to know git to get started with it). It provides the student, within a few seconds, with a pre-built coding environment (which you, as the teacher, can customize using .gitpod.yml), without making any assumptions about what kind of computer they have or what software is installed on it, other than "a reasonably modern browser". It's a wonderful teaching tool - it allows students to spend less time on getting their environment set up just right (what if a subset of your students use a mac? linux? a chromebook? an older version of Windows? a Windows computer set up with an alternative shell, meaning there is no start menu?) and drops them right into, effectively, VS Code set up just-as-the-teacher-intended.

You can have completely separate classes on "how to use a local computer", which, amusingly, is also best accomplished using a virtual environment in the browser, to neutralize the differences between their computers.

Answer 8

The server and client world are getting ever more indistinguishable. Some programming languages pull dynamically libraries from the web during build. At the tender age of your students maybe not bother them with distinctions that are pretty vague. Meaning: let them use online programming tools.

I know, not quite the answer you wanted.

Answer 9

One has to see the current state of the art; eg super device, which are connected or even foldable desktops. The actual difference is the file-system being used; unless they would understand the difference in between eg. a local file:// or content:// URI and a remote https:// URI, this all might be difficult to understand. A SSD and a local HTTP server could be used to demonstrate the difference. Then one can also show removal USB storage, etc. Offline mode also demonstrates the difference. One may have to teach the very basics, in terms of a) physical hardware and b) remote services. The behavior might stem from being used to eg. a Chromebook. See 3 strategies to change user behavior. And the idea is not even completely wrong; AWS Cloud9 might be an option. Or how about running a ChromeOS device in an Android emulator, just to show what it is?

Directly letting them compare a local IDE with a cloud IDE would show the possibilities and limitations of each of the environments. I mean, one just would have to develop a teaching program which both kinds of students can apply; eg. instead of saying "open your local shell prompt" this would be "open your gcloud ssh shell prompt" (in a browser window). Alike this, nobody would have to feel "wrong" for simply not knowing it any better and they could compare. Then one can start teasing them, eg. with commands that may work locally but not remotely, or the other way around (always two students, who can compare).

Answer 10

Depending on your classroom hardware, the most straightforward way it to get them coding in VS Code on a small Unity project.

This demonstrates two things:

• File structure of a project
• Command line to build/debug the project

You could use "Hello World" from the command line, but Unity will hook them b/c it's very visual and a game engine they recognize.

Check out http://coffeebreakcodes.com/sample-projects-unity/

Answer 11

A comment to my other Answer suggested that this would be useful information, but I felt it was tangential to that answer so here is another one.

Consider that voice is becoming the default way to tell a computing device something, and for it to respond. Office 365 has Dictation built in, and it works well. Even children can now accidentally get their invisible pal to order things.

In this situation, how would anyone know what is on their device, and why would they care? Perhaps we need to advance teaching beyond what we do now, to what people will be doing very soon?

Humans have used primarily voice to interact with other beings since long before Cuneiform became the killer app 5000 years ago. It seems vastly the easiest way, and can be used while doing other things.