A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad • Hacker News Board

Re: A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad

#111

Post by hopeless » Wed, Apr 07, 2010, 12:56 PM UTC

ghotli wrote: post #93

stuff4ben wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird, my twins are almost 3 and they have yet to play with a computer except the couple of times I had some Elmo episodes up on Youtube. Most of their play comes with the old fashioned puzzles and dolls and other assorted toys. I figured they wouldn't know what to do with a computer, but clearly I need to revisit that. What kind of things can a 3 year old do with a computer? I admit I haven't the foggiest idea…

My two year olds cant get enough of this game: Open up notepad. Maximize the window. Change the font to 72. Turn on caps lock. Let them have free reign on the keyboard and tell them what letter they are holding down. After about two months of this they are pretty proficient at the keyboard and at their letters. For mouse skills fullscreen Microsoft Paint. Same results.

You need BabySmash... but it's mostly for younger kids. They hit keys and the letters spin on the screen accompanied by fun sounds.

Re: A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad

#112

Post by glhaynes » Wed, Apr 07, 2010, 3:53 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #88

philwelch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's fast. Everyone complains it doesn't have multitasking, but is there really a better way to switch apps that would be any faster than that even with multitasking?

People want multi-tasking for non-interactive tasks. They want to compose email while streaming music, or browse the web while chatting on IRC. So switching doesn't matter much; that's easy with or without multitasking.

Yeah, I think a lot of the quality of the debate is lost to the word "multitasking".

"Backgrounding" seems much more descriptive of what is really desired by most iPhone OS users (and non-users) who say they want "multitasking".

Re: A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad

#113

Post by nitrogen » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 6:32 AM UTC

sumeeta wrote: post #97

adriand wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really can't be overemphasized. I have a child about the same age (two-and-a-half) and he's been playing with my iPod Touch since I got it December 2008. He's proficient with it, just like her - able to easily navigate between the different pages of apps, launch new apps, use the navigation within apps, etc. But obviously, it wasn't like that when he first used it. It took time. For example, it took forever to t…

How about a similar experiment about 20 years ago? Has anyone watched a young child try to navigate a command prompt? I mean changing directories, and maybe eventually learning a basic understanding of the filesystem and what files are. I always tell people I learned how to navigate MS-DOS when I was five from watching my cousin do it. I wanted to get on the computer and play games, and I just remembered what he’d ty…

I learned DOS when I was about that age by watching the commands from autoexec.bat flash by when the computer was booting (the guy who built my parents' first computer didn't put @echo off at the beginning, which probably led to my becoming a computer programmer :). I thought I was king of the world when, at 6 years old or whatever, I exited the Direct Access menu system, typed "prompt SpSg", and actually made the computer do something I told it to do (it took me a few reboots ro realize that it was $p$g, not SpSg).