Building foundational skills for programming beginners

Every time I teach or help in a hands-on workshop I'm reminded how many people are not facile with their file system. Step 1 is often to download workshop materials, open the slides in a PDF viewer, and open a file of code in RStudio. For some this is second nature and happens fast.

Others immediately fall behind because they are not accustomed to downloading a file or an archive of files to a specific and deliberately chosen location, then navigating there in various apps, and opening individual files. By the time they've done it, they've missed the first 15 mins of material, which is usually critical setup and context.

I would dearly love to find a basic lesson and self-assessment tool for people to work on this skill on MacOS and, especially, Windows!

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