Data Anaylsis and Interpretation

I collected a lot of data for this project. It mostly showed that this generation knew enough to get by in school, but often not much else.

Observations

I was able to observe the browsing habits of seventh graders as part of my study. While they tended to be savvy enough, they did some things that surprised me. For example, the kid I interviewed was looking up information relevant to a conversation with his friend, and he exclusively used the AI overview on Google as his source. I've seen my teachers do this before and it always irks me the wrong way, as Google's AI overview has famously been too gullible on multiple occasions (see the time it recommended eating several rocks per day).

While working on projects, they also did many time-saving actions. One kid opened all his tabs from clicking links on the Clever dashboard. Another checked the to-do list of approaching due dates on Canvas to find instructions for an assignment rather than scrolling through the modules page to find it manually. While getting image references, one student used the Wikipedia summary page on the side of Google results to find the Cincinnati Bengals logo, not even bothering to check Google Images. Near the end of class, a student asked how much time was left, even though their opened laptop had a clock.

One interesting thing I noticed was how these kids went about playing games in class. Zoomers my age love to play these on their computers, but they tend to play puzzle games, and they almost never play them in fullscreen. Meanwhile, the two kids I saw playing games were playing elaborate runner games in fullscreen - one was playing a motorbike game and the other (my interviewee) was playing geometry dash. Hilariously, the kid who was playing the former had a "performance issue alert" in his browser, which told him that it still had some games fully loaded and they were eating up his CPU. He ignored this alert.

Interview

This part is short and sweet. I interviewed Ian, who told me he only really used his personal computer to play video games. This shows one of two main use cases this generation has for a computer - gaming.

Survey

Out of the 56 responses I got, twelve children born in 2012 or later filled out my survey. This was the main group I was looking to study. Here are my findings on them:

1. Many of them thought that websites were the same as apps. One responded to the question "what apps do you use on your computer" with websites used for schoolwork such as Deltamath, Focus, and Canvas. The Focus bit was alarming to me as there has never been an app for it. I wonder if this generation sees the words "website" and "app" as synonyms.
2. Some did not know how to print something. With printing docx files, two of the twelve would ask someone else to print these for them, whle four had no clue how to go about such a thing. That or they didn't know what docx files were - I looked over the shoulder of a kid who was answering this question and they asked me "what do I put if I don't know what these are yet?".
3. Two of the twelve said they used an adblocker, and both said they used Pie. This was interesting to me as older kids who used adblockers generally preferred uBlock Origin. I later saw a youtube ad for Pie, so I wonder if Pie's marketing targets this generation. They did not use an adblocker significantly more or less than the other kids I surveyed, though.
4. This generation rarely owns their own computer, usually sharing one with someone else. Only two of them said that they owned their own computer, while four said that they don't use any besides their own school laptop. Most of the others said they used a family computer. One of them said they shared one with a relative - they were also the only one to use a chromebook. These results lined up vaguely with my research, though I wonder if sample sizes are what led to the overabundance of family computers in my data. I imagine the reason so few owned their own, though, is due to the ages of generation alpha (as those counted in the study were, at maximum, 13 years old).
5. Some of them did not know what their operating system was. I had two "unknown" answers to what OS they used the most. Out of the four who only used their school laptop, one said that their school laptop was a chromebook, while another didn't know what their operating system was. This was curious to me as all of our current school laptops run Windows 11. I wonder if the student who thought their laptop was a chromebook either previously used a chromebook in elementary school or just assumes that all school laptops are chromebooks. Overall, though, most used either Windows 10 or 11 (an even mix of both), with a couple using MacOS.

After looking through all twelve survey responses, I graded them on a scale of one to four. One was completely unfamiliar with computers and three was familiar enough to do most tasks on a computer. Four was a high-level user experienced with niche things few would know about, and none of them scored a four.

In the end, the average score this generation got was 1.583 (1+7/12) and the median was 1. Seven got a one, three got a two, and only two got a three. There are many factors that could cause such low scores, such as age and generation alpha's proven preference towards portable devices (remember - 78% use tablets!). However, what seems pretty evident is that this generation may almost exclusively use most features of a computer in the context of school. As an interesting comparison, the average score of the seven people who were born in 2007 was 2.286 (2+2/7) and the median was 2, so yeah. Gen alpha scored pretty low!