
Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel to 11 Year Olds? - marmot1101
http://blog.joshorr.us/2013/10/why-hell-are-we-teaching-excel-to-11.html
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kevingadd
Excel's one of the first apps I learned to use and it's still a useful part of
my toolbox to this day. It's incredibly powerful, and unlike so many modern
web/iOS/android 'apps', it teaches you that the computer is your slave,
instead of the other way around. You don't have to conform to the whims of
some developer and bend your tasks to fit only what they anticipated.

You could certainly create a better spreadsheet than Excel and teach it to
kids instead, but it's a great way to get started when it comes to
understanding that computers exist to do your bidding and that you don't have
to be afraid of numbers and data.

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eof
Why are we teaching thirteen year olds how to use the quadratic formula? Why
are we teaching seventeen year olds how to do integrals or multiply matrices?

I mean, I am all for letting kids be kids, but if school was limited to what
<insert age group> find's interesting, it would be nothing but gossip, sex,
drugs, and video games.

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jumpman44
Are you really comparing Excel's place in computing to the Quadratic formula's
place in mathematics?

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eof
no, i am comparing excel's place in the life of a kid to the quadratic
formula's

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wvenable
When I was an elementary school student, we had a computer lab full of brand
new IBM PS/2 and installed on them was the Microsoft Works suite.

This old version of Microsoft Works had a complete interactive tutorial on all
the parts of the suite (Word processor, spreadsheet, database). A big part of
our time learning computers was going through that tutorial. It was actually
interesting and fun calculating numbers in the spreadsheet and advancing the
tutorial.

To this day, my understanding of Excel comes from my time in that class. It's
certainly not the worst class I had with computers in my lifetime.

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BruceIV
When I was 11 Dad taught me how to use Excel to make a spreadsheet to compare
the new minivans he was looking at buying (because I kept stealing his
brochures and poring over the feature tables at the end). I later used it to
make a chart showing how, compared to my brothers, I should have a later
bedtime. Admittedly, I was a major nerd, and still didn't use Excel much, but
I mention this to point out that kids can find uses for it.

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mynameishere
Spreadsheets are useful, and the school teaches them. So what? Schools also
teach trigonometry, and most people never think about it again. Same with a
lot of things.

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headcanon
I remember learning how to use Excel when I was around that age, for the
purpose of making charts for science projects. Since they're probably learning
basic statistics and data analysis around that age, Excel is an effective way
of figuring those things out, with tools they will likely have at home. With
that said, I would prefer stuff like that be taught in the context of a larger
project (like I did with the science fair project), rather than an end in and
of itself. I also agree with the OP in that they should also be learning
creative stuff as well during their computer lab time.

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nonchalance
Excel isn't just about "boring office tasks"! There's a whole website devoted
to games built in excel:
[http://www.excelgames.com/](http://www.excelgames.com/) (my favorite is
[http://carywalkin.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/version-1-3-ar...](http://carywalkin.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/version-1-3-arena.xlsm)
)

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bello
True. That's probably not what they're teaching in schools though.

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teyc
Here's an anectode in support of Excel. My 12 y.o. son was doing a project on
seasons and climates, and he asked me whether it rains more in cold weather.
And he gave me a certain line of reasoning.

Since real teaching moments can be hard to come by, I suggested we not stop
there, but look at the data. Climate information is readily available on the
internet, and we used Excel to plot out whether there were correlations.

Excel on its own has little value, but as a tool, it can make analysis
painless and encourage people to form hypothesis and check them out quickly.

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nav1
> Why the Hell Are We Teaching Excel To 11 Year Olds?

Probably because it's a rather useful skill to have. I can't think of a valid
reason why teaching someone how to use Excel would be a bad thing (the author
does not really provide one either). But large corporations use Excel, so we
couldn't possibly allow kids to use it. What if they become accountants?
Excellent article...

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brudgers
I showed my son Excel and he played with it over the next few days and showed
his best friend - adding and dividing and multiplying lots of numbers at once
was interesting for a while.

It's not that it replaced keepeeupee as recreation, but it probably changed
the way he interprets the world a little bit because it came at a critical
age.

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neuroguy
Interesting point, but the idea of learning excel is to learn computational
thinking from an early age.

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Pxtl
I know - Excel is the bare-minimum introduction to "programming" that most
folks get.

Honestly, I think the industry has failed a bit here - we haven't really
provided a good substitute for the spreadsheet when it comes to letting
complete non-coders do elaborate computational tasks. I mean, Octave is a
great tool for scientists, and I've seen some fun graphing calculator apps...
but for some reason Excel endures. A kid wants to graph a formula? They do it
in excel, even though that means they have to find a way to provide all the
X-coordinates.

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nwp90
In case the author reads this - just FYI your site is being blocked by
Fortiguard as "malicious". I'm guessing either your site has been compromised
or something nasty has been served up by an ad network at some point (maybe
now, maybe past).

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milesf
Give kids Microsoft Excel and they'll find ways to have fun with it
[http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/microsoft-excel-
artworks/](http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/microsoft-excel-artworks/)

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wellboy
Who upvoted this?

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ivanbrussik
Spreadsheets...you know those rows and columns in databases? Yea why bother
teaching them, no one uses SQL.

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oddshocks
Why the Hell are we teaching garbage proprietary software to anyone?

~~~
ericcumbee
I've never seen knowledge of Open Office as a required skill on a job listing.

~~~
oddshocks
I can't even fucking handle Hacker News

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_-_-_-
I taught my teenager days ago to use excel for sorting data to solve a math
problem. It was a large set of data given in the problem, and it made no sense
to do it by hand.

The problems that they give these days are either poorly thought out or just
don't make sense to do without technological assistance. I think it is the
former rather than the latter. Today's technology isn't needed to learn most
of the concepts that are required to excel later in life, and my daughter is
probably not going to be using pivot tables as an adult. I do think that word
processing is a hell of a lot faster than having to do corrections with a
typewriter, though. But the extra time having to think before you typed, or
wrote for that matter, was a good thing. Today kids are being trained to just
spit out online or in a text whatever comes into their head. That is going to
be a disaster.

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vacri
Why the hell are we teaching kids how to use a hammer in Woodshop? After all,
it's useless knowledge unless you become a carpenter, right, and how many
people choose that as a career?

