⌨️ Teaching Digital Skills

What the evidence says about teaching typing, files, search, spreadsheets, coding and more — at what age, in what order.

• AI and homework integrity: the primary-school version of the problem
  Chatbots can do most homework — what that actually breaks, why detection is a dead end, and the redesign options (process evidence, in-class performance, AI-assumed tasks) that work at primary age.
• AI literacy for primary ages: helper, not oracle
  What children actually need to understand about AI chatbots and generators — the mental model that prevents both magic-thinking and panic, the homework question, and what the (young) evidence supports.
• Blocks to text: what the transition research actually shows
  Block-based programming works — the studies say so — but the move to text is where children stall. The comparison evidence, the frame-based middle ground, and how to sequence the handoff without losing them.
• The command line for children: why the oldest interface still teaches best
  The case for terminal literacy in upper primary — precision, composition, and the truest picture of what a computer is — plus how to teach it without the fragility of a real shell.
• Computational thinking in primary school: what it is and how it develops
  Decomposition, patterns, abstraction, algorithms — what computational thinking actually means, the evidence on teaching it to children, and the constructs ladder from sequences to functions.
• Debugging as pedagogy: the bug is the lesson
  Why fix-the-broken-program tasks teach what write-a-program tasks can't — Papert's reframe, the error-climate research, prediction-run-explain, and the emotional engineering that makes it work.
• Email as a genre: teaching the letter's strange successor
  Why email deserves explicit teaching before children have accounts — the genre conventions (To/CC/BCC, subjects, reply vs reply-all), the judgment calls, and the professional norms worth installing early.
• Ergonomics for children at computers: what matters and what's folklore
  Children's computer setups are adult furniture minus adjustments — the honest evidence on posture and pain in young users, the cheap fixes that matter most, and the habit that beats any equipment: movement.
• Teaching children to evaluate sources: after the checklist era
  Why the CRAAP-style checklists failed their tests, what the fact-checker studies replaced them with, and how source evaluation scales down to primary age — three questions, not twenty-six criteria.
• Screens and children's eyes: myopia, strain, and what 20-20-20 actually is
  The real eye story isn't blue light — it's the myopia epidemic and its best-evidenced counter (outdoor time), plus digital eye strain and the break heuristics. What's evidenced, what's folklore, and what schools should actually do.
• The filesystem mental model: teaching where things actually live
  Why children raised on apps and search don't have the folders-and-files model, why it still matters in a cloud world, and how to teach containment, location and paths from scratch.
• File naming: the smallest skill with the longest payoff
  Why 'Untitled(7).doc' is a retrieval debt, the naming rules that serve both browsing and search, version-naming before version-control — and teaching it as a kindness to your future self.
• The home row method: why touch typing starts from ASDF JKL;
  The logic of home-row anchoring — reference frames, the F and J bumps, finger-to-key mapping — what's evidence and what's convention, and the common instruction mistakes that undo it.
• Hunt-and-peck fossilization: why typing habits set early and cost forever
  Self-taught typing plateaus, and the plateau arrives early — what skill-acquisition research says about automatized bad habits, the retraining dip, and why the teaching window matters.
• Teaching digital skills: the evidence map
  The pillar guide: what research actually says about teaching typing, files, applications, search, computing and AI literacy to children — organized by the claim each skill area most needs examined.
• Keyboard shortcuts: the evidence for teaching the fast way
  Why shortcut users outperform menu users, why almost nobody switches without being taught, the paradox of self-taught inefficiency — and the caret-navigation skills that multiply the payoff.
• Lateral reading and SIFT: teaching children to evaluate online information
  The Stanford studies that exposed how badly students judge online sources, the fact-checkers' habit that actually works, and how to teach leave-the-page evaluation to primary-aged children.
• The constructs ladder: sequencing loops, conditionals and functions
  The order programming concepts should arrive in, what makes each one genuinely hard (misconception research included), and the design rule that changes everything: teach a construct only where the task forces it.
• AI-text detectors don't work: the evidence schools need
  Why machine-text detection fails in principle and in measurement — the false-positive problem, the bias against non-native writers, OpenAI's own retreat — and what schools should do instead of buying detectors.
• Children and misinformation: what the research actually covers
  An honest map of the evidence on children encountering false content — where the data is real (ad recognition, adolescent studies), where primary-age research runs thin, and what that means for teaching.
• Prebunking: inoculation theory in the classroom
  The evidence that exposing people to weakened manipulation techniques builds resistance — the games and trials, the decay problem spaced practice answers, and what scales down to primary age.
• Presentation literacy: teaching children that slides are not the speech
  The multimedia-learning evidence behind 'less words, more pictures' — redundancy, signaling, and why reading your slides aloud is the best-documented way to make an audience learn less.
• Query formulation: teaching children to ask machines good questions
  The search-query research on how novices actually search, the keyword-thinking children must be taught (natural questions vs term selection), operators worth knowing — and iteration as the real skill.
• Screenshots are not evidence: teaching provenance
  Children treat screenshots as proof — of conversations, scores, news. Why they're trivially fabricated, what provenance actually looks like, and the double lesson (don't trust them, don't trust them to disappear either).
• Search vs folders: what the retrieval research says about finding your stuff
  The personal-information-management evidence on navigation vs search, why people who have folders still browse to files, and the both-tools curriculum children actually need.
• Sponsored results and lookalike URLs: reading the road signs
  The most-failed item in the Stanford assessments — telling ads from results — plus URL anatomy for children: what the address actually says, and the imposter patterns worth drilling.
• Spreadsheet thinking: the most underrated numeracy vehicle in primary school
  Why spreadsheets are secretly a mathematics laboratory — variables before algebra, functions before functions, what-if reasoning — and the evidence-informed progression from cells to real projects.
• Accuracy first: the one typing-instruction principle worth being strict about
  Why speed-first typing practice automatizes errors, what the motor-learning and typing research says about the accuracy-speed relationship, and how to run accuracy-first without killing motivation.
• When should children start typing? The age-readiness question
  What motor development, literacy interaction, and the fossilization clock say about starting formal touch typing — why the answer is a window (roughly 7–9), and what to do on either side of it.
• Typing speed benchmarks by age: realistic expectations for children
  What typing speeds are actually realistic for children at each primary age, why accuracy targets should come first, what the research really supports — and why most benchmark tables you'll find online are made up.
• Word processing: a progression that follows the writing research
  The meta-analytic evidence that word processing helps young writers — especially strugglers — and the skill ladder that unlocks it: transcription, editing, formatting-with-restraint, structure, then style.

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