File Not Found

It's the same year that posts began to pop up on STEM-educator forums asking for help explaining the concept of a file. About halfway through a recent nine-month research project, he'd built up so many files that he gave up on keeping them all structured. While many of today's professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today's students increasingly don't remember a world without them. "I grew up when you had to have a file; you had to save it; you had to know where it was saved. There was no search function," says Saavik Ford, a professor of astronomy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Among her students, "There's not a conception that there's a place where files live. They just search for it and bring it up." She added, "They have a laundry basket full of laundry, and they have a robot who will fetch them every piece of clothing they want on demand." The primary issue is that the code researchers write, run at the command line, needs to be told exactly how to access the files it's working with - it can't search for those files on its own. She's begun to see the limitations of directory structure in her personal life; she uses her computer's search function to find her schedules and documents when she's lost them in her stack of directories.