To say she thinks the magazine is a broken iPad is quite a leap. There is nothing to indicate that she thinks it is an iPad. And there is nothing to indicate that she thinks it is "broken".
She is simply trying familiar gestures on a similar looking media.
Give her magazines for the next couple of days and you may find she tries to turn the iPad over looking for other pages. It's not because she thinks the iPad is a broken magazine. It's simple familiarity. First we try what we know. Failing that, we begin to experiment.
Here's a great TED talk discussing how babies this age go about learning how to deal with the world. Essentially there's a lot of experimentation as other folks have commented on but there's a part towards the end about how they seem to use a super sophisticated statistical model of the world to figure out the odds of things working. http://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think....
Exactly. The only thing that this video proves is that she has the right reaction by analyzing and experimenting with different objects. That's how we learn.
My son (not quite 2) engages in all these same behaviors. He pokes things, points at things, touches things, checks to make sure his finger is still attached, pokes things some more... and he's been doing it since long before he was allowed to touch the tablet computer.
Sometimes when he touches, say, pictures in a newspaper or magazine, he's just trying to get daddy's input (same as when he touches something in a board book.) He touches a picture, and I'll say "it's a blue car!" or "what a furry kitty!" You might mistake it for "thinking the newspaper is a broken tablet", but not for long.
I wouldn't even read that much into it. Infants learn a whole range of new gestures as they get finer motor control.
Newborns flail around not even knowing they've got arms. Then they learn to guide their arms and hit things. Then they grab. After a while they develop a sort of lobster pinch with the thumb against four fingers and can pick things up. Then they develop the thumb and forefinger pinch and can gently manipulate small things.
I'm pretty sure my nine-month old son would behave just like this, even though he's never seen an iPad. In his technologically-deprived state he contents himself with examining crumbs and bits of fluff from the carpet.
A week or so after first encountering a Kinect, with its combination of gesture and voice recognition, my little boy was using a restaurant toilet with a touch-free flush, and after realising that it had flushed itself in response to his standing up, he turned round and said "toilet: flush!" to see if it also had voice control.
My son - admittedly the child of geeks, so maybe a little ahead of the curve - is growing up in a world where screens have always responded to touch; where devices can usually react to being tilted or moved; where you can control things through speaking, or gesturing.
Exploratory trying is a form of discoverability. Plus the whole social context of learning new gestures through friends using similar devices.
I looked at a Blackberry Playbook at the store and tried to use it without having ever seen anyone else use one before. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to close an app before finally looking it up online with my iPhone.
What amazes me is how GOOD my son is on the iPad and iPhone. He turned 2 in June. He can unlock the phone, knows the passcode, can get into any app and knows the "flick" gesture. On his iPad, he can navigate to his Sesame Street episodes or random Pixar movies.
I learned computers on an Apple IIe and a Mac, and this is basically that for him. To think that by next year we'll have retina iPads, by the time he's "using" computers for things like school, it'll be like really bright paper.
Next to the staggering complexity of learning how to drive a human body, and learning human language more-or-less from scratch, flicking, logging in, and getting to favorite episodes is a parlor trick. The only reason we think it's amazing is because of the number of adults we interact with that have decided that they are "technologically incompetent" and refuse to interact with technology and just throw their hands up. If 2-year-olds benefit from anything here, it's not coming with pre-existing notions of what they can't do.
Which can also be overromanticized; my two-year-old once demonstrated that he did not have a preconception about how unwise it is to stand up on a kitchen chair and throw yourself at the back with all your strength. He has what you might call a postconception now.
I think this shock that a two-year-old could drive an iPad in simple ways says more about the adults and the poor quality of their ideas about children than much about the children themselves.
I learned computers on a Mac+. At two I could load the disk into the drive, load up Paint Shop Pro, "paint" a painting.
The lesson isn't that iDevice's (or apple products) are amazingly intuitive -- it's that 2 year olds are quite smart and good at learning/playing/exploring.
Ah, so you're complaining that he was actively interacting with his target program (painting) instead of passively interacting with it (watching and 'consuming' a film, whatever 'consuming' means in that context).
Depending on which way you want to spin it, you could claim the ipad is better (omg! kid does less work and gets to sit back entertained!) or worse (omg! kid has lost the ability to actively create something, become a passive consumer instead!).
No I wasn't diminishing anything i was just saying the context of interaction and media consumption changes dramatically and what is normal for a two year old to figure out on their own will likewise change dependent on the affordances of the tools.
My kids will often unlock my phone to get at the Peppa Pig game but something inside me still thinks it's not right that a 2yo has his own iPad. I don't know what. It's probably irrational but I can't help feeling that books and posters are more appropriate. Of course, time will tell. I wonder if the games and interactive media on an iPad might shorten the already minuscule attention span of children :-\
Edit to add: I didn't want this to sound like I was critical of your parenting. In fact I'm probably jealous. We bought a poster on the Solar System for our 3.5yo daughter because she spotted Jupiter next to the moon yesterday and wanted to know what it was. And now I wonder whether I should have tried to buy an iPad and StarWalk?!
He has his own iPad (a first generation WiFi only) because we wanted to lock it down so he couldn't delete apps, etc.
He uses it for reading practice, coloring, watching movies, playing music. It's been great for cognitive development, letter identification, and especially music, which is his favorite thing.
I've learned to not discuss parenting on Hacker News however. Yikes.
This is what it'll look like though. Till now we've debated about putting computers in classrooms. Now it's going to be ridiculous to consider stripping him of his many computers, especially when taking him to the learning place.
Hey, my gf (25yo, ph.d in medecine), sometime try to zoom by pinching my macbook screen.. it takes 1-2 secs for her to realize "oh right, this is not the ipad". We always laugh of these moments :D
To be honest, I'm surprised there's not more touchscreen a little bit everywhere. I.e. On the coffeemachine, microwave, etc. It makes it so damn easier as you're not forced to use 1 interface to cover all use cases.. you can simply use a hierarchical smart interface.
Except grab things without grabbing them. The kid was doing the pinch gesture without pinching the paper. It doesn't look like grabbing to me, so much as gesturing. The paper would have crinkled if it had been grabbing.
Whenever I show a friend a Kindle, their first instinct is to try to turn the page or click a menu option. I think for adults we just assume all electronics are touch screens now.
The other day I was reading a printed version of the NY Times and I caught myself trying to flick scroll a column with my index finger once I reached the fold.
that happened to steven wright too. except that his house started. so he took it for a drive. parked it on the freeway and screamed at everyone to get off of his driveway.
When my daughter was one years old she thought the box that the iPad came in was a broken iPad. I didn't jump to any conclusions about the superfluousness of packaging or my daughter's inability to understand a world with boxes.
I did, however, tell her to think outside of the box. She didn't get the joke. Probably because she was one. Also, the joke wasn't that funny.
What does a one-year old do on an iPad (or other tablet for that matter)?
For those who are parents--are there certain apps/games you let your young ones play around on? Or, is the behavior demonstrated by the child in the video learned primarily by way of observation?
Definitely. There's a number of blogs dedicated to apps for toddlers. Not sure about a one-year-old, but my two-year-old was finger painting, dragging letters onto words, and rearranging dinosaur parts, and browsing YouTube for videos of trash trucks (he got his older sisters to enter the search terms). My original iPad is basically a dedicated kid computer. The older kids write school papers on it (Pages + keyboard dock), the younger kids play games (educational and otherwise) and sometimes Netflix videos. We do have an XO laptop, and it only gets dug out of the bin when one of the kids is playing "going to work" and needs a faux laptop to lug.
Imitating their parents.
Something that I believe is quite deep in our brains, children can't help it. My daughter imitates how my wife picks up the phone when she answers a call. It is hilarious they are a perfect little mirror for all the things you constantly do. They copy them like a true comedian, overdoing the most significant aspect and dismissing the "context" that make you feel normal while usually doing them.
Look up an app called "Rattle". My kid figured that one out at six weeks.
Also, "pocket pond" style things work pretty well with infants. Basically anything where stuff happens when you touch the screen. Though it helps to pick apps where it's difficult to pull up blocking menus. It's amazing how quickly a random-clicking toddler will find his way to the purchase screen in the App Store in most apps.
My one year old loves looking a pictures on the iPad. But she is really just as fascinated with flicking the home screens back and forth and seeing what happens when she presses the different little pictures.
I remember reading an article of the difference between 2 year olds and 3 year olds. A two year old will see a picture of a shoe and try to put their foot in it whereas a 3 year old realizes that the picture is only a picture.
I imagine the 1 year old in the video is also falling into the 2 year old trap. But as people have commented this is just how learn and how our brains develop.
I haven't gone so far as to do it physically, but I have felt the subconscious niggle to pinch-zoom something in a magazine a little while after a heavy browse of tumblr or ffffound... Very odd & disconcerting.
You should see my niece, 18 months old. She can unlock my iPad and find Netflix or Angry Birds as fast as I can. Now of course she needs help past that, but still.
The cognitive leap to associate moving a mouse or keyboard (in your hand) with stuff going down on a screen is significant compared to just touching something you see and it moves. The former represents how we typically interact with a computer, the later how we interact with everything else.
It's actually kind of amazing that Apple made both those interaction types - Apple 2 was THE FIRST time you had a keyboard + screen, and the iPhone/iPad are(perhaps more arguably) the most successful implementations of touch screen interaction.
I'm actually quoting Steve Wozniak, but sorry, I should have made clear I meant for an affordable consumer device. Apologies.
Edit: No doubt, to be totally honest it's not an area I really know too much about, I just have Steve shouting "THE FIRST" engraved in my memory from a few years ago...
I think because "screens" are 2-D and little kids need to learn that things are 3-D. Also, screens don't have texture. Everything on a screen is artificial, which is fine once you understand what it is trying to represent, but not before.
my nephew, before he could speak full sentences would point to things and say "click." "Click" was his all-encompassing verb. When he wanted cereal, he stood next to the fridge, pointed up to the cereal box and screamed "cliiiiiiiik."
I wasn't being 100% direct either. The author still credited, or better yet, blamed Jobs for something he didn't actually do-- design the iPad. It seems pretty common, at least with non-techheads, that "Steve Jobs" is used interchangeably with "Apple".
On the other hand, it seems pretty common for techheads to misunderstand what "design" is. I'd say Steve Jobs designed the iPad the same way Frank Gehry designs his buildings: by conceptualizing it and sketching the overall design, leaving the details to his aides.
What was the "design" then? A sketch of a really thin tablet PC? That doesn't seem so creative or innovative to me. I think more credit is due to the engineers who brought it to life. Moreover, I haven't actually seen any sketches done by Jobs. I'm not saying they don't exist; I just haven't seen any.
Not necessarily this one instance, but many people that I've talked to tend to credit Jobs with many technical achievements, if not everything Apple ever did.
She is simply trying familiar gestures on a similar looking media.
Give her magazines for the next couple of days and you may find she tries to turn the iPad over looking for other pages. It's not because she thinks the iPad is a broken magazine. It's simple familiarity. First we try what we know. Failing that, we begin to experiment.