Education for and with CIVEMSA: Boon, bust, and (maybe?) boon again for computers in our classrooms

I will review the past and present of “education for CIVEMSA and CIVEMSA for education”, then offer a few suggestions about where their futures might lie. The evolution of computer technology and the evolution of our thinking about its role in classrooms and teaching laboratories provide a natural timeline. There is also a spatial element to consider: as with the teaching of instrumentation and measurement itself, at any particular time distinct national and regional differences are apparent, and they are fairly weakly coupled, so taking a birds-eye view we get to observe multiple experiments running in parallel. Regarding the present and the foreseeable future, I would particularly like to review recent research that shows — it seems stronger than just “suggests” — that students who take notes on laptops learn less well than students who use pen-and-paper, and from there speculate a little about the consequent implications for CIVEMSA topics.