Sadie and Computers and Stuff
Here’s something different; discussion of computers and the very young.
A lawyer who used to work for my big client has a husband who’s something of a geek, so they have several different computers in their house, and he built (most of) a do it yourself old-fashioned arcade game console, for which I supplied a couple of cables.
Their daughter got her own computer when she was one.
I’ve e-mailed in an effort to get feedback from them, but thought I’d have some fun and post it too. Does anyone have experience with or thoughts on computers for babies?
My main question is what’s out there for software. My other questions are how heavily to supervise, and how to set it up physically for ease of use and safety.
I have several older computers that I can choose from. We’re not talking anything new here. I could even go back as far as a 386. Which would be fine if I were to make it a DOS machine as I’d been thinking. The idea being for it not to get upset about being unexpected rebooted, and that I already have some DOS games and educational stuff for the younger set. Plus when I gave my nieces and nephews computers, having DOS and a batch-based menu I created made them learn how to read all the faster.
On the other hand, there may be newer fun/educational stuff made for Windows that would be better than anything I have or could reasonably find. If it came down to it, I could even create something that responds to random banging on the keyboard, just so she has her own keyboard that does something. Maybe set her program initially to be the Windows shell on her machine, so it’s all she sees when she turns it on.
Anyway… thoughts? She’s obsessed with our computers and not being able to use them. In that regard, three months from now can’t come soon enough. At the rate she’s going cognitively, she may be better able to use it than I might have expected. Besides climbing over things and through tight spaces, climbing back down gracefully, and pushing light things out of her way, she has started stacking and building things. Oh, she also has started recognizing when she has pooped and that she really wants changing immediately, and crawls to her mother to ask to be changed, recognizing that her mother usually handles those.
I suggest you start her off with Jumpstart Toddler, or if they have an earlier Jumpstart (I think they may have Jumpstart Baby, but we started with Toddler).
The first skill is to learn to use the mouse. JToddler has several activities that award mouse activity - special favorites are the hidden picture section. A picture of an animal is layered with leaves, coins or candy wrappers, and the toddler “wipes” them away with the mouse. Any random mouse click will take off a leaf/coin/wrapper, and when all of them are gone the animal will sing a song for her.
Another section has musical instruments, and when you click on an instrument it plays a song - there are two or three different songs for each instrument.
It’s pretty basic, and as I said it really reinforces and teaches the mouse, and it works on toddler level stuff - object permanence, repetition, cause and effect. Later disks get more into math and spelling, but the Toddler level is a great entry just into beginning computer skills.
You should be able to find a version that will run find on a Win98 machine, we used it on a 1996-era 100mHz Gateway for many, many years.
Once she’s gotten past that, all the JumpStart programs are pretty good.
Posted by on 06/26 at 04:16 PM
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