Garland thought this was an easy fix. She asked each of these students where they saved their project. On the desktop? On a shared drive? But each time she was met with incomprehension. “What are you talking about?” – the students were perplexed. Not only did they not know where they saved their files-they just didn’t understand the question.

Gradually, Garland began to understand what her fellow professors had been coming to over the past four years. The concept of folders, directories, and files, necessary for the previous generation of users to understand how a computer works, seems like gibberish to today’s students.

Different teachers have different memories of when they first encountered this misunderstanding. Surprisingly, however, they all agree that this problem has been occurring for the past four years – that is, since the fall of 2017.

Around that time, Lincoln Collin, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Sussex, suggested to his graduate students, of whom there was an entire class, that they download a file from a certain directory, and encountered bewilderment in their eyes. That same semester Nicholas Guarin-Sapata, an applied physics major and teacher at Columbia’s EAFIT University, noticed that his students were having trouble finding the right document. That same year, posts began appearing on forums for science teachers asking how to explain the concept of the file to students.

Guarin-Sapata likes hierarchy and order. His computer has an intricate hierarchy of file folders, and on his smartphone, he sorts all the photos into categories. He went to college in the early 2000s and was required to know how to keep his papers organized. Now he approaches hard drives like file cabinets. “I open a drawer, and there’s another cabinet in it, with its own drawers,” he told us. – It’s a nested structure. At the very bottom, I find the folder or leaflet I want.”

Guarin-Sapata organizes everything according to the directory structure model. This is the hierarchical folder structure that modern computers use to organize files. The computer doesn’t save a file in some infinite space-it puts it in the Downloaded folder, the Desktop folder, or the My Documents folder, each of which belongs to the My Computer branch, and each of which may have other folders. This idea is intuitive for anyone who remembers what a floppy disk is.

Such a structure is associated with the physical arrangement of objects – a file on a computer is stored in some specific, separate place. Such a concept always seemed obvious to Garland, but it is completely foreign to her students. “I imagine a certain thing lives in a certain folder. It’s there, and to find it, I have to go there,” Garland says. – They think it’s all in one bucket.

That’s consistent with the ideas Joshua Drossman, a senior at Princeton, has had about computer systems all his conscious life. “The most intuitive thing for me would be to think of a computer as a laundry basket, where everything is piled up and you pull out from there what you need right now,” he said, trying to describe his vision.

Drossman is studying to be a financial instruments developer and operations researcher. He knows how to write programs, he was taught to navigate directories on a computer in school, and he understands the importance of the concept in his field of study. However, it doesn’t come naturally to him, and sometimes he gets confused. He worked on his last research project for about nine months, and somewhere along the way he collected so many files that he stopped trying to keep them organized. “I try to keep them organized, but at a certain point there are so many files piling up that it’s a mess,” he says. Many of the files ended up just piled in one folder.

Peter Plavchen, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, encounters similar behavior in his students, and he can’t get used to it. “I have computers in my lab that my students use. And they have thousands of files on their desktops with no structure whatsoever,” he says in astonishment. – I myself am reverent about organizing space, and they have no problem with having 1,000 files in the same directory. I think there is a fundamental shift in attitude toward file access.

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