Who Works at Home, Why, and How You Can Join Them How ...

grams available for younger
children. We'll take a look at
the special challenges of ear
ly childhood software, estab
lish some criteria for
software selection, and then
examine a few titles that may
be of interest if you have
young children at home.
The Special
Challenges
of Toddlers
While good educational soft
ware can be created by any
one who is sensitive to the
needs and learning styles of
children, good preschool
software is harder to devel
op. You may want to start
your search by looking at ti
tles published by companies
whose designers include pro
fessional educators or people
who have worked in the ear
ly childhood arena for many
years. Some publishers, like
MECC (the Minnesota Edu
cational Computer Consor
tium). Sunburst Commun
ications, and The Learning
Company, have well-de
served reputations for excel
lence. Other publishers
are creating good products as well. Even
so, remember this: It's harder to write a
good program for young children than
it is to write one for adults.
A well-balanced program for tod
dlers and preschoolers has a magical
quality. You can seat yourself in front
of such a program and find that hours
pass without your knowing it. Time
seems to stand still because you've en
tered a state called/Zou1. Social scientists
who have studied flow have found that
not only do people love the experience,
but that learning seems to take place
without efFort.
In the world of computing. I think
of flow as our ability to "fall through
the looking glass," to go beyond the
computer and to be completely engaged
with the program as though the com
puter wasn't there.
As parents, we must be careful to
understand that it is the child's flow
experience, not ours, that we're trying
to facilitate. A program that looks bor-
30 COMPUTE!
How Young
Is Too Young?
Parents should let children come to the computer. If a child is
showing interest in the computer of his or her own accord, then
this interest can be supported by the parent.
Computers shouldn't be used as electronic baby-sitters.
Young children need to be with other people their own age.
Children should be sitting in sandboxes, riding swings, running
through fields of grass, throwing rocks into streams, making
spaceships out of cardboard boxes, drawing with crayons, and
experiencing life with all their senses engaged at once. Viewed
from this perspective, the computer doesn't have much to offer.
First, it tends to focus on reflective or intellectual activities. The
motor skills are associated with the fingers, not with the large
muscle groups, and the visual stimulus is highly constrained.
Children learn how to express their own developmental
needs. They're great at creating their own games and learning
situations. Most reach out to each other to build their own
secret worlds whose scope is unknown to adults. Keep in mind
that, even without computers, children acquire tremendous
vocabularies, social skills, problem-solving skills, and their own
sense of identity without any formal teaching at all. With the
possible exception of its use for children with special needs, the
computer can, at best, be only a tiny supplement to the learning
environment that children create for themselves.
I would never buy a computer for a toddler. 1 would,
however, support a toddler's self-expressed interest in comput
ers, just as 1 would support his or her interest in the piano or
books or watercolors.
ing to us may be the most wonderful
thing our children have seen. This is
easy to forget.
Daddy, Why Does R Come
After E?
Have you ever watched a small child
struggling with a traditional (QWERTY)
keyboard? Not a pretty sight.
The current arrangement of keys on
our computers resulted from an attempt
to get around mechanical problems in
the original typewriter developed during
the nineteenth century.
Originally, the typewriter keys
were in an alphabetic order. Because of
mechanical problems, fast typists
would jam the keys too easily. This
problem was solved by arranging com
mon letter pairs so they would be as far
apart in the type basket as possible. The
resulting scramble of keys made the ar
rangement hard to use.
While there may be historical
reasons for perpetuating this
disaster on computer key
boards used by adults.
there's no excuse for using it
with children. Work by psy
chologists in the mid-1970s
showed that some young
children will hum the alpha
bet song under their breath
while looking for the right
key on the keyboard. Obvi
ously, this doesn't work very
well.
I n response to this prob
lem I designed an alphabetic
keyboard specifically for
young children. The motiva
tion for this layout was not
to make it good for fast typ
ing, but rather to support the
child's intuitions regarding
key placement. If you ask a
child what letter comes after
E, he or she will probably
say F, not R. By providing a
keyboard that supports chil
dren's ideas about letter
placement, we can free them
to explore a computer pro
gram without having to cope
with a strange arrangement
of keys.
To see how important
this is, suppose your child is
working with a program that
teaches letter sequence (Alphabet Circus
by DLM has this activity). If the com
puter asks the child what letter comes
after R and the child looks at a standard
keyboard, he or she will logically type
T, since this is the next letter on the
keyboard. By using a keyboard whose
letter order is scrambled, we risk con
fusing children.
Our work in the mid-1970s resulted
in the Muppet Learning Keys, a key
board for young children that is avail
able from Sunburst Communications
for most personal computers. Several of
the programs described in this article
work with the Muppet Learning Keys,
and I've encouraged all software devel
opers to support this keyboard when de
veloping software for young children.
Many people who look at things
such as custom keyboards feel that they
only prolong a problem, not solve it.
After all, these people say, sooner or lat
er our children have to learn how to use
the "real" keyboard.