Further Observations in Computer Instruction

After a two-week hiatus (some super-secret army training), my soldiers have returned to Namitembo for their thrice-weekly computer classes.

This time around, like the Grinch who stole Christmas, I had a "wonderful, awful idea." I switched out the mouse on one of the computers (the fastest and most popular computer), installing a horribly jerky, unreliable, often unresponsive mouse in its place. I mean, this mouse is bad. Practically worthless from the point of view of the consumer - but it's been a great teaching tool.

Right off the bat, my students asked me why I swapped out a perfectly good mouse for this piece of crap. I told them, "You need to get used to using substandard equipment - you never know what you'll be working with in the future." But that was really just my secondary objective. The true method to my madness came to light a couple of days later, after more than half of my students had tried out the mouse (always with frustrating results). I said, "Well, actually, there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts you could use to navigate around, if the mouse is causing you trouble."

So, I sat down with my students and introduced them to the joys of the ALT key (for switching between menus and programs), TAB (for going back and forth between options), CTRL and SHIFT (for highlighting), and a few others. They were psyched. I've actually never seen them more excited about a lesson. Most of them use the new keyboard shortcuts I've taught them now as a matter of course, whether they have a working mouse or not. (It helps that these shortcuts are the same between Windows and Ubuntu!)

The thing is, I've tried - many, many times, with past groups of students - to teach these things. It never stuck. Everyone liked using the mouse just fine, so they didn't really put any effort into learning these alternative techniques. I had to demonstrate to them first that if they depended on the mouse alone, they'd be helpless without a good working mouse. Once they realized that, they were eager to learn the new tricks.

I have to go - somebody's just asked if there's any way to minimize a window using the keyboard. Sounds like a job for ALT-SPACE.