Kids and the Touchscreen Revolution


“The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.”
-         Maria Montessori, developer of the Montessori educational system

Maria Montessori was born in 1870 and died in 1952. Keep those dates in mind and re-read the quote at the top of the blog. Done? Ok. Now answer this: do you think Montessori would be turning in her grave to learn that developers who write baby and toddler apps for smartphones and iPads quote her lines to ennoble the touchscreen age?!
 (I realized my 20 month young daughter expects everything to be touch enabled when she swiped PC monitors and expected a response!).

So many apps on the iPad that my daughter plays with are interactive: fairy tales have options to dress the princess...with matching shoes and a tiara to boot (not that she understands any of it). She could paint the scenery (which she can’t, so my wife and I do it…happily) or do puzzles as she goes through the fairy tale. Welcome to the world of multi-tasking, baby!

As this article titled The Touch-Screen Generation said, this brave new world brings additional responsibilities on parents:
“On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition—but only if they are used just so.”

True, because it is not only the educational apps that kids love. They like the music (including nursery rhymes) and video apps just as much.

But is any of this a bad thing? Is it something we need to worry about?

If today’s kids are digital natives (a term coined to describe the first generation of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games, and other technologies), then shouldn’t we accept touch and swipe as the new normal? After all:
“To a toddler, this (a swipe moving a bus or dragging an object) is less magic than intuition.”
No wonder then kids take to it like a duck to water. I guess my wife can relate to this comment from a parent in that article:
“Technically I was the owner of the iPad, but in some ontological way it felt much more his than mine.”

No surprise then that the majority of top selling apps in the “Education” section of any app store (iTunes or Google Play) target pre-school or just-joined-school aged children.

In any case, isn’t contingent interaction (I do something, you respond) a vast improvement over what we grew up with, the passive TV?

I personally agree with these lines by Björn Jeffery, developer of a popular kids app:
“Is running around on the lawn educational? Every part of a child’s life can’t be held up to that standard.”
And also with these lines by Marc Prensky, an education and technology writer:
“We live in a screen age, and to say to a kid, ‘I’d love for you to look at a book but I hate it when you look at the screen’ is just bizarre. It reflects our own prejudices and comfort zone."

Of course, it would be interesting to see how my views change as my daughter grows up…I just hope she doesn’t use what I wrote now against me later!

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