You could certainly create a better spreadsheet than Excel and teach it to kids instead, but it's a great way to get started when it comes to understanding that computers exist to do your bidding and that you don't have to be afraid of numbers and data.
I mean, I am all for letting kids be kids, but if school was limited to what <insert age group> find's interesting, it would be nothing but gossip, sex, drugs, and video games.
This old version of Microsoft Works had a complete interactive tutorial on all the parts of the suite (Word processor, spreadsheet, database). A big part of our time learning computers was going through that tutorial. It was actually interesting and fun calculating numbers in the spreadsheet and advancing the tutorial.
To this day, my understanding of Excel comes from my time in that class. It's certainly not the worst class I had with computers in my lifetime.
Since real teaching moments can be hard to come by, I suggested we not stop there, but look at the data. Climate information is readily available on the internet, and we used Excel to plot out whether there were correlations.
Excel on its own has little value, but as a tool, it can make analysis painless and encourage people to form hypothesis and check them out quickly.
Probably because it's a rather useful skill to have. I can't think of a valid reason why teaching someone how to use Excel would be a bad thing (the author does not really provide one either). But large corporations use Excel, so we couldn't possibly allow kids to use it. What if they become accountants? Excellent article...
It's not that it replaced keepeeupee as recreation, but it probably changed the way he interprets the world a little bit because it came at a critical age.
Honestly, I think the industry has failed a bit here - we haven't really provided a good substitute for the spreadsheet when it comes to letting complete non-coders do elaborate computational tasks. I mean, Octave is a great tool for scientists, and I've seen some fun graphing calculator apps... but for some reason Excel endures. A kid wants to graph a formula? They do it in excel, even though that means they have to find a way to provide all the X-coordinates.
Color me surprised if the curriculum involves VBA or conditional formulas. Lego mindstorms might suit the OP in terms of creative And computational successor to hypercard.
The problems that they give these days are either poorly thought out or just don't make sense to do without technological assistance. I think it is the former rather than the latter. Today's technology isn't needed to learn most of the concepts that are required to excel later in life, and my daughter is probably not going to be using pivot tables as an adult. I do think that word processing is a hell of a lot faster than having to do corrections with a typewriter, though. But the extra time having to think before you typed, or wrote for that matter, was a good thing. Today kids are being trained to just spit out online or in a text whatever comes into their head. That is going to be a disaster.
