Hiya

Babi2.0 recently had her 1^st birthday.  She’s been having fun with the Toca Band app but hasn’t quite figured out what makes it work. She keeps trying to recreate the music by wiggling her fingers over a locked smartphone screen whilst dancing, makes sense, that’s what she did the first time and it worked perfectly.

Other recent advances are that she has started to hold rectangular objects, phone, tv remote, toy with buttons to her ear and say “hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya…” Before 11 months she had been known to hold conversations via pasta and wooden blocks. She has identified the dvd remote as not being a phone because she points that one at the TV, usually during an emotional scene in a Tinkerbell as if to torment her big sister.

She attempted some interaction with Mwnci Bach, a more child friendly version of the popular talking cat and dog apps but soon got frustrated as there’s no dancing to be done.

Babi1.0 is honing her fine motor skills and can just about trace large letter shapes with jerky movements. The CYW alphabet app is an excellent tool for this.

Babi two point zero

The late night blog is the curse of the working parent.  Still, reflecting on my little ones’ technological advances makes washing the dishes seem less of a chore.

The big little person (now 3 years and 3 months) started full-time school nursery at the beginning of the month and her language and communication skills have improved.  She is increasingly curious about the different apps on my iPhone, she wants to know what they are all for and is generally disappointed to find access to our external hard drive or the news headlines.  Her new favourite is Spotify although she can’t navigate it, she hands me the phone and says “I want ‘Mi Welais Jac y Do‘ please”.  We need to teach her some new songs.

The littlest little person is a few days short of 11 months old so I think it’s time she started earning her keep.

She was 8 months when she first showed any interest in a Smart Phone, Babi number one was watching a cartoon and it held Babi 2’s interest for around 10 seconds.  From around 10 months she started to pick the phone up and play with the touch screen so those would have been her first conscious interactions with it and I assume the realisation that “if I touch the screen the pictures move”.  I have not noticed her try to replicate the effect on books or magazines.

This week I gave her the iPhone with Toca Band open and running but no instruments selected. Within seconds she had dragged one of the characters onto the stage area causing it to play a tune and was so pleased with herself she spent a good 2 minutes bouncing up and down in time to the music.  So now we also have “if I touch the screen it sometimes makes a noise” added in to the mix.

I a my three!

Babi recently had her third birthday and to celebrate three years of motherhood I upgraded my LG smartphone to an iPhone. I have officially gone over to the dark-side.  I got a little bit baby app happy so now Babi has a hairdressing app, an app to cook for monsters, an app for dressing up pixies and an app for making music.  I’ve been blown away by the ease with which she interacts with this stuff.  She’s not spending long with it, 10 un-supervised minutes in the mornings while I’m feeding Babi2.0 or getting dressed, 3 mornings a week over a fortnight, so that’s what, an hour of exposure to the iPhone apps and already she has learned conventions such as a cross closes the app or window, a door takes her to a different virtual environment, a camera will take a snapshot of what’s on the screen, the “Big Button” takes her back to the home screen where she can choose another app.

Most suprising of all is that her favourite app is none of the above.  She calls it “Dime” (dim-er from a Welsh nursery rhyme), she pesters me for it, she sulks when she’s denied it (regularly).  It’s also my favourite app and probably for the same reasons.  You can create, record and edit sounds with it. Yes, my three year old’s app of choice is GarageBand!

more babies using tech

This is the video I showed at the PLE conference in Berlin. An edit of my two favourite examples of babies using i-pads. The originals are here and here.

Sticky Fingers

My usual approach with new Apps or devices is to let Babi work it out for herself but this month I gave in and tried to teach her how to use a track pad.  She is still convinced that my MacBook has a faulty screen.  I am sure that she thinks I’m a bit stupid for not having it fixed.  She gives me the same incredulous look I used to give my Mother when she talked about black and white telly.

We were playing a Peppa Pig game where you drag different characters onto the stage and they each play a different instrument.  Babi’s logic tells her to touch the character she wants and drag her finger across the screen to move it.  Half way across the screen she realises that something isn’t right, maybe she didn’t press hard enough.  On the third attempt I explain, no, that doesn’t work. “Broken Mummy?”

I tell her to watch the cursor, get her to wiggle her finger on the track-pad, watch the cursor, wiggle some more, see if you can draw a square… ‘That’s very clever Mummy”.  I ask her to choose a character, she puts her finger on the screen.

We ended up playing together with me controlling the cursor and her telling me what to do.  Every time I got it wrong her hand jumped straight to the screen to fix it.