"Students have never taken a toaster oven apart, certainly never built a radio," said Lynn Abbott, associate professor of computer and electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. "They've never changed the oil in the car, never seem to have gotten their hands dirty with how things work. That has had an impact on how we have to teach the courses."

Ironically, Macaulay blamed the computer for a generation's inability to understand how computers — or anything else highly technical — work.

Encased in plastic, with simple plug-ins, a computer never demands that you look inside it, only that you push the right keys to make it work for you.

"If you give the computer what it wants, then you look like you've built something, but you really haven't," Macaulay said. "If you don't know what to look for, the tool will do it for you and overwhelm you. That's a disservice to the tool and the user.

"The notion of not seeing it yourself, of relying on the computer to see it for you, is a big problem," he said. "We become seduced by the computer and think we've completed a problem because it looks finished. But the fundamental problem isn't answered."

-- Bill Scanlon (12/1/00)