My first experience with computers as a tool in the workplace, was when I took a computer course at Sheraton College in the early 80’s. \u00a0Desktop computers had recently made inroads into the office workplace, and this course taught the basics for office use, such as word processing (Wordstar* and WordPerfect), spreadsheets, and programming languages such as BASIC and Fortran. I loved learning the tricks of word processing and this was valuable later in life when Microsoft Word became the default program. I also remember being completely baffled by Fortran, however, a little more competent at BASIC. I loved the way I could program the computer to do something I wanted it to do, but got extremely frustrated when it didn’t work because I missed a step in the command sequence. Fast forward to today, and I see similar frustrations and elations when my students are coding using programs such as Scratch. It gives me pause to reflect on how far we have come in making it easier for people to create using computers, and how similar the learning experience is now as it was for me then, and I wonder what programs or platforms we are using now that might become obsolete, and what the advances might be for use in the classroom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My first experience with computers as a tool in the workplace, was when I took a computer course at Sheraton College in the early 80’s. \u00a0Desktop computers had recently made inroads into the office workplace, and this course taught the basics for office use, such as word processing (Wordstar* and WordPerfect), spreadsheets, and programming languages […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25997,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1669384],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-auto-e-graphy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25997"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":755,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions\/755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}