I had the same experience in the UK around 2005 to 2011, I wonder if it's the same everywhere?

I feel that my experience was far worse and bordering on the absurd and bureaucratic. We spent years following instructions, taking screenshots of us opening specific windows and dialogs in Office etc, saving all these screenshots into a Word document, and then printing the document.

To be clear, it was every single action you took. Moved the mouse to "Insert"? Don't click it yet, take a screenshot of your mouse on the "Insert" button, and then click it, and take a screenshot of the menu that opened. Then, take more screenshots of moving your mouse to buttons and lists in dialogs that opened. Then, take a screenshot of the document with the thing you just inserted.

Now, write several paragraphs in detail about what you just did. Print everything, and that includes both the document you just created for the exercise and then the document writing about the document creating exercise with all it's dozens of screenshots.

Each individual printed piece of paper needed to be kept in a plastic wallet, which was then kept in document folder. In the end we had multiple of these document folders that were without a doubt a complete waste of paper and time.

The argument was that it was needed in case the exam board decided it needed to double check the teachers scores, which I think never happened once anyway. There was never once a reason given for why each individual piece of paper needed to be put in a plastic wallet.

This was during a period of time where CS education at schools had essentially totally vanished from the curriculum for decades, it was added back after I'd finished school.

Words cannot describe how much I despised the entire ordeal. There simply are not enough words to describe the total absurdity of an IT class requiring screenshots of clicking buttons and being printed onto paper.

While the teacher was trying to explain how to add PowerPoint transitions I was writing scripts that would fetch currency conversions and graph them because I was that bored. One time I write some terrible "chat" system via some type of free shared HTML/PHP hosting and meta tag based auto refreshing of the chat history for a few class friends to talk across the room.

Fellow former British schoolkid here. One part that really sticks in my memory about "IT" class was when they were preparing us for an exam that asked "which of these are functions of an image editor" and we had to memorize that, I think "fill tool" was, "pen tool" wasn't, "adjust brightness" was, and so on, without reason or reference to reality. There was just a list and you had to know it.

I imagine these people were delighted when a Big Computer Company offered to step in and design a curriculum for them.

Yeah, my experience was from the UK between like 2002 and 2007.

Speaking with my younger cousins it seems nowadays they have the opportunity to learn actual programming and so on.

We just got Doom (the 1995 one) and Street Fighter 2 to work via LAN and played that during the class, one person would do the actual work each lesson so we still had something to hand in.

Getting the LAN to work wasn't easy so I suppose it taught me that!

And yet that generation knows how to use computers, and the current generation doesn’t