Wednesday, April 7, 2010

A Toddler Uses iPAD - Watch for Native Navigation

Author Elliott Masie at

5 comments:

  1. From Todd Lapprin's Blog (www.laughingsquid.com) about his 2 1/2 year old daughter's experiences:

    'My iPhone-savvy 2.5 year-old daughter held an iPad for the very first time last night, and it turned out to be an interesting user-interface experiment.

    As you can see, after geeking out on my Sutro Tower homescreen, she took right to it — including figuring out how to enlarge some of her favorite iPhone-legacy apps to 2x to display full-size on the iPad screen. If you’re good at understanding kid-speak, you’ll also notice that she immediately saw its potential as a video-display device. She lamented the lack of a camera, and wondered about its potential for playing games.

    On the downside, she had the same frustration as many adults, where touching the screen-edge with your thumb while holding the iPad blocks input to all home screen icons. Notice also that she was confused by the splash page for FirstWords Animals, her favorite spelling game: Because the start button looked like a graphic, rather than a conventional button, she couldn’t figure out how to start the game.

    Most of all, though, it’s cool to consider that as one of the new Children of Cyberspace, her expectations about computing will be shaped by the fact that she’s growing up in a touchscreen world"

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  2. Hi
    Amazing! I presume she had been using iPhone, right?

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  3. Masie Learning could pioneer finger gestures that create a 'branded' lexicon around learning.

    Like you said on the call, finger gestures could have meanings specific only to learning. Tight circle = access a learning menu. Or zig-zag = ask for help on a social network

    Mike Young

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  4. she also seem to "jump" from one app to the other rather quickly, not sticking to one "game" more than a minute or so. so much choice seems to lead to a "need" to explore everything, but not get involved/engaged with things very long and deeply... I notice the same phenomenon with myself on the web: I'm often browsing around, picking up disconnected pieces of information here and there and no longer reading through half a page of text... to me that will also be part of this "cyberscape" generation's mental make-up. I'm not lamenting, just trying to show that changing the tools we use to interact with the world will also lead to other unexpected changes in our mental/cognitive/emotional brain works...

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  5. My daughter uses my Ipod Touch religiously - she is 4. I never once had to show her how to use it. On the other hand, she has shown ME some features about it. These things do not come with 'instructions', as we are used to from the good ol days. Intuition and the wiring of her little technology/social media brain takes right over.

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