جيل اللمس !!!

 

نشرت صحيفة الجارديان البريطانية (guardian) مقالا مطولا عن قدرات الجيل الجديد في التعامل بسلاسة مع الحاسب والهواتف الجوالة الذكية قبل أن يتعلموا حتى الحروف الأبجدية أو الكلام. وعزز المقال هذه الملاحظات بشواهد لدراسات استخدم فيها جهاز الآيباد أو الآيفون مع هذا الجيل والذي لم يجد أي صعوبة في فهم آلية التعامل معه ، لأنه ببساطة يستغل اللمس (وهو ما يتقنه الصغار) في التعامل مع هذه الأجهزة.

إن تعامل الأطفال مع البيئة حولهم تعتمد على الفطرة والسجية، عكس الأشخاص البالغين والذين يجدون أن أي تقنية جديدة بحاجة إلى تعلم. فالأطفال الصغار لا يفرقون بين الأجسام المعروضة على شاشة الآيباد وبين الأجسام في الواقع. فتجد الطفل يحاول سحب الجسم لخارج حدود الآيباد ظنا منه أنه جزء من الواقع. ولكن هل لهذا التصرف الفطري من الطفل الصغير دلالات بحثية مستقبلية للنظر في إمكانية دمج العالمين (الافتراضي والواقعي) ببعضهما ليتكاملا؟ قد يكون الواقع المزيد (Augmented Reality) هو البداية ولكن نحن بحاجة إلى المزيد.

 

Techno-toddlers: A is for Apple

In the last chapter of her novel A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan imagines a dystopian near future in which toddlers in the year 2020 download music to their ubiquitous "kiddie handsets", which also feature "finger drawing, GPS systems for babies just learning to walk, PicMail". But if that's the future, it's already here. There are dozens of "finger painting" apps in the iTunes App Store, and child-tracking GPS devices have been available for years. A recent Financial Times story was headlined: "Companies target children's tablet aptitude."

Earlier this year, AVG Technologies, a firm that makes antivirus computer software, conducted a survey of mothers of children aged between two and five with internet access at home. They found that more of the children knew how to play a computer game than swim or ride a bike, and that more pre-schoolers knew how to use a smartphone than tie their shoelaces. Research by Plymouth council, meanwhile, found that 72% of children under five spend on average half an hour a day online. AVG's conclusions, unsurprisingly, boiled down to the message that it's never too early to protect your children from the dangers lurking on the internet. Those of us without a commercial interest at stake will probably have a more confused complex of reactions: surprise, anxiety, recognition, wonder, resignation. Small children and digital technology, in their very different ways, have a tendency to knock us slower-witted adults off our feet with amazement. Watch the viral YouTube film of a gurgling baby happily navigating an iPad and then trying to "swipe" a magazine and you may start to feel a little obsolete yourself.

On a bright Saturday morning in October, I went to a basement kitchen in London to observe six children, aged between two and six, testing two new iPad apps that are being developed by the publisher Nosy Crow. In Animal SnApp, when you match up the top and bottom halves of a series of farmyard animals, you're rewarded with a story. But at least half the fun comes from making hybrids. Leni, who's six, and her sister Hester, four, look through the pictures together, Leni tapping the arrows at either side of the screen, Hester sweeping through them with a nonchalant flick of the finger. "Baa baa chicken have you any cows," Leni sings. They put the top half of a horse with the bottom half of a cow. "It has horse feet," Leni says. The adults – Camilla Reid, Nosy Crow's editorial director, and Deb Gaffin, the digital product and marketing director – peer in. Leni isn't wrong: cows have cloven hooves, and the illustration doesn't. The first lesson, when making apps for children, is don't think you can skimp on the details.

When Eva, five, and her brother Frederick, three, arrive, Gaffin and Reid want the youngest two children to have a go with Bizzy Bear: Fun On The Farm, the first app to be developed from Benji Davis's series of novelty board books. Hester takes control, tapping the dog to make it bark, sliding the pigs up out of their pen and feeding them apples from a bucket. "When is it going to be empty?" she asks. "Why?" Gafffin asks. "Because then you can turn the page," Hester says. In a later scene, Bizzy Bear has to drive the tractor into its barn. "How do you get him out of the tractor and park it?" she asks. "You just hear it and hear it and hear it." Gaffin is taking notes: these are all problems to be ironed out.

Then it's Frederick's turn. He's less adept, pressing the screen harder than he needs to while Hester gives him breathless instructions. "Touch that little house, Freddie. Lift up the... You have to get a pig first. Just press... Get the apple quick. No don't, drag. I think this is a bit tricky for Freddie."

My daughter is not yet two, a few months younger than the youngest of Nosy Crow's quality control team, but since I got a smartphone, she has learned how to scroll through photographs and zoom in and out. Watching videos on it, she'll try to slide the picture around to see something offscreen. The first time she saw an iPad, she was taken with an app featuring a purple hippo that repeats everything you say to it and laughs when tickled, though she wanted to grab its head and seemed disappointed when her fingers bumped against the screen. The hippo wouldn't play with the ball that she threw to it, either. No doubt Apple are working on a virtual-reality glove to improve the tactile experience of iPad users – if so, will it come in toddler sizes?

Apple wouldn't be drawn when I asked them if they'd had such young users in mind when they were developing the iPad, though it's not really surprising that toddlers should find it so easy to use: the interface is designed to be as simple, intuitive and unmediated as possible – you touch what you're interested in, which is a skill that no child needs to be taught. As Jonathan Freeman, a psychologist at Goldsmiths who studies the way people experience digital media, points out: "If you look at the history of the development of computers, mobile phones and video games, they're moving away from needing to be an expert. The [Nintendo] Wii made it possible to play games without knowing how to manipulate a game pad. With an iPad, a two-year-old or a 70-year-old can use it pretty much instantly for some basic tasks."

Makers of accessories and software haven't been slow to cash in. For around £20 you can get a thick foam-rubber frame to protect your iPad from being played with too roughly, and the number of apps being developed for small children is ballooning. In March, the Guardian reported on the "key trends driving kids' apps forward in 2011". Top of the list was "remote parenting", with the example of Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime, developed by the Shoreditch-based design studio ustwo™. Children can play around with interactive animations based on nursery rhymes while Mum or Dad, away on a business trip, can read Humpty Dumpty aloud from their iPhone thousands of miles away: heartwarming story of a family staying in touch or potent image of 21st-century alienation? Either way, the app has sold more than 20,000 copies. And the interactivity opens up possibilities for children to try things that would never occur to most adults, brought up on linear versions of the rhymes. During user-testing for Three Blind Mice, ustwo's Matt Miller says, "After chopping the tails off the mice, the kids [aged two to four] would instantly try to put them back on which, at that stage of development, wasn't an option. But after that we made sure it was."

When Gaffin showed Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime to some of the Nosy Crow children, none of them tried to put the tails back on the mice. But they spent quite a long time trying to drag Jack and Jill's pail of water up and out of the well. Fish occasionally leapt out of it, but there didn't seem to be any way of getting it out of the well: once they'd pulled it to the top, it just clattered back down to the bottom. "I don't want this," Hester said eventually. "I want the funny monster" (meaning Grover from Sesame Street, apparently). She pressed the menu button to close the app.

James Huggins, one of the creators of The Land Of Me, "an interactive world of creativity and learning for children aged two to six" published in association with Ladybird Books, makes a distinction between computer games and computer toys: games have rules and objectives; toys are whatever you make of them. But if the Nosy Crow children are anything to go by, the assumption is that if it's on a computer, it's a game. The concept of a computer toy is something many children and their carers still have to learn to get their heads around.

The interactive element of a lot of software aimed at young children, Huggins says, is a "marketing afterthought", letting you "mess with the content" but not much more. The Land Of Me, however, is meant to encourage "communication, creativity and collaboration", and to do that it needs to be used by "adults and children playing together", so it was designed to "appeal to adults as well". Miller agrees: "Our aim was to capture the minds of the parents as well as excite the children," he says.

And interestingly enough, though perhaps not surprisingly, it's really the parents you have to worry about when it comes to the potential dangers of playing with electronic toys. Michaela Wooldridge, a developmental psychologist in western Canada, has for many years worked in the field of early intervention, helping parents of developmentally delayed babies. She recently carried out a study to see if the ways mothers interacted with their toddlers differed depending on whether they were playing with more traditional toys – a shape sorter, a book, a toy animal – or battery-powered equivalents. She found that with the electronic toys, "Parents were not less affectionate, but they were less responsive, less encouraging and did far less teaching. It was almost like the toy was interfering. They were trying to figure out a) how to make it work and b) how to have the child make it work."

We may be dazzled and baffled by the hi-tech wizardry and newness of it all; our children take this stuff for granted. The latest technology is no newer to them than anything else they encounter. As Huggins says, "A banana and an iPad are two things that have always been there" – plus you can eat the banana; objects don't get much more interactive than that. According to Wooldridge, "Children under two and a half at least, but maybe even three, really don't understand screen two-dimensional formats very well." Experiments have shown that a two-year-old watching a video of his mother explaining to him how to find a hidden object will find it much harder to follow her instructions than if she's in the room with him. Huggins says that young children are "100% more awed" by the way a "paper castle builds out of nowhere" in a pop-up book than by anything they see, hear or touch on a computer screen.

Bruno, two, sitting on his mother's lap to play with the Bizzy Bear app, taps a duck, which quacks and dips under water. He smiles. Unlike Frederick, he has an instinctively light touch; unlike Hester, he doesn't seem interested in trying to complete any tasks, but is happy to explore. Is this because he's young enough not to bring any preconceptions to it, or has he already learned how the technology works? Their father has an iPhone, the boys' mother says, so they know how to use it, but haven't often.

There's no doubt that small children love pressing buttons, looking at bright flashing lights and listening to funny noises, partly for the same reasons that adults do – like rats, we can't help responding to sensory stimuli – but also precisely because adults do. A child will see how rapt her parents are by a mobile phone or computer screen, and imitate their behaviour: these things are clearly interesting, because Mum and Dad can't keep away from them. A lot of the battery-operated toys available for children are imitations of adult toys: my daughter has a "phone" that rings and says the numbers one to four in two languages. It is entertaining enough, but it's not clear how well it fulfils either of its nominal worthier purposes: teaching her to count and letting her play at being on the phone. She will occasionally press it to the side of her head and say "hello" but then she'll also do that with remote controls. She doesn't need a "phone" to pretend she's on the phone.

"As you remove the reality," Huggins says, "they just make it up." Freeman says: "I'm always amused by how entertaining my two find playing creatively with cardboard boxes – still wins hands down over a few minutes with the iPhone." As for learning to count, as Wooldridge says, "Your child can push buttons all they want, but without your involvement they're not going to go beyond that."

Software makers agree on the importance of parental involvement. John Siraj-Blatchford, honorary professor at the University of Swansea Centre for Child Research and head of the team of experts that advised the makers of The Land Of Me, argued in Nursery World last year: "A child's computer time could be solitary, sedentary and of little educational value. Or it could be educationally rich, involving a group of children, for example, interacting together at the computer and encouraging off-screen activities..." Wooldridge's worry with smartphones and tablets is that "parents are putting on programs just so that the child can be distracted. It's no different from giving your child your cellphone while you're in line (another survey by Flamingo from July this year found that 75% of mothers had handed their smartphones to their children); we used to give them our keys for the same purpose."

Excessive computer use has been blamed for a decline in children's physical abilities over the past decade. A study at Essex University, published in Acta Paediatrica in May, found that 10-year-olds in 2008 could do fewer sit-ups, had weaker arms and hands, and fewer of them were able to hold their own weight hanging from a bar, than 10-year-olds in 1998. It's a sedentary activity, certainly, with all the downsides that implies, but the idea that sitting in front of a computer is straightforwardly solitary, too, is increasingly outdated. The rise of social media and video-calling software such as Skype means that ever more of the time that everyone, including or especially children, spends online is in the virtual company of other people – which brings us back to the image of parents reading nursery rhymes to their children from the other side of the world, and the question of whether technology is bringing us closer together or driving us further apart.

When my parents and their granddaughter see each other on Skype, she seems more present to them than they do to her. This is partly because she's still working out how to make sense of seeing things on a screen, but it's also because, again, they're impressed by the technology and she isn't. Freeman makes a comparison with the movies: "An adult is more likely to be blown away by the magic of Avatar in 3D than a kid for whom it would be almost their baseline of what cinema is." Once upon a time, hearing someone's voice on the telephone probably gave as immediate a sense of their presence as seeing their face on Skype does now. Our expectations shift as the technology changes: like the Red Queen in Alice Through The Looking Glass, we're running to stand still.

And the technology is changing incredibly fast: by the time my daughter is a teenager, let alone an adult, iPads will have gone the way of videotapes. Playing with an iPad won't be enough to teach her to deal with the technology she'll be faced with when she grows up. "You've got to learn how to learn first," Wooldridge says. "Then you can learn pretty well anything that comes along. If you only learn how this particular VCR or toy or computer program works, then you're going to be limited to that. The children that have had very rich experiences in the first three years are the ones that seem to be able to use all these things that are coming into their environments later on with more ease and with more meaning. They have to make meaning of the world around them in the three-dimensional aspect, in real time, before they can understand the world through the virtual."

After an hour and a half of taking shifts on the iPad, the Nosy Crow children had all drifted away to play with the other attractions on offer: a toy stove ("Do you want pizza for tea?"), a huge pumpkin waiting for Halloween, the Bizzy Bear board books. Frederick was out in the garden with his mother.

As I was about to leave, Reid mentioned that she'd recently found at her mother's house an old Game & Watch, one of the primitive handheld electronic games that Nintendo made in the 1980s, precursors to the Game Boy, Wii and, indirectly, smartphones everywhere. The craze swept primary schools across the country; I remember playing them endlessly on the school bus. Reid had hers with her. "Look," she said, putting it down on the table beside her iPhone. "They're almost exactly the same size."

 

Thomas Jones

      The Guardian, Friday 18 November 2011