>> Some students today apparently don't even know what files and folders are?
This isnt just coders. I work with people every day who do not understand directory structures. I blame "cloud" apps like o365. They dont understand that the human can dictate where a file is saved and stored. They just expect that the machine will save it somewhere according to the type of file, or that all files for a project will be in one big space defined by the UI interface for that project. But then i ask for them to send me a copy of a file for whatever reason. All they can do is attempt to send the file to me from withing the UI, only to another user within whatever app they are logged in to. They dont know how to move discreet files between discs or directories on thier own, or even that such things are possible.
I blame Android (and to a lesser extent, iOS). In early Android, you had a filesystem resembling desktop Linux. Nowadays, apps' files are secreted away in a dir who-knows-where and other apps can't even see them, let alone read them—for good reason—but the same lack of privilege extends to the user via their file manager (if the OEM was generous enough to leave them one).
Compare this to a time when floppy disks (either kind) were ubiquitous, and while the average PC user then may have been less informed of how their machine worked than today, I assure you that they would have had a good grasp of moving files around. Routinely handling disks with your own two hands contributed to that, I feel.
This isnt just coders. I work with people every day who do not understand directory structures. I blame "cloud" apps like o365. They dont understand that the human can dictate where a file is saved and stored. They just expect that the machine will save it somewhere according to the type of file, or that all files for a project will be in one big space defined by the UI interface for that project. But then i ask for them to send me a copy of a file for whatever reason. All they can do is attempt to send the file to me from withing the UI, only to another user within whatever app they are logged in to. They dont know how to move discreet files between discs or directories on thier own, or even that such things are possible.