Source: nytimes.com
By: Warreb Buckleitner
Anyone lucky enough to share a life with a young child knows how determined they are to randomize your day. They’ll empty your purse or wallet, reprogram your cell phone and figure out how to speed dial 9-1-1. The highest value items are those with the most potential for trouble– your car horn, the panic button on your car keys, the lens on your digital camera, or that fascinating slot on your laptop. “I wonder where the disk goes?”
To a curious child, real gadgets are far more interesting than a traditional, often lame plastic toy. If you have such a child, don’t worry. They’re just doing what they’re supposed to do: copying mom or dad, making sense of the world.
Leapfrog used this idea to create Text & Learn ($22) a handheld toy that looks like a chunky green and white BlackBerry. Powered by three AAA batteries, the toy (and yes, it is a toy) combines a responsive QWERTY keyboard with a LCD screen and clear speech.
While it won’t tweet or make calls, it can make exploring the relationship between letters and the sounds they make entertaining. For example, if they press K, they hear “K, as in Karate Kick” while a bear animates does the routine on the screen. There’s also a pretend-calendar feature, and a letter-matching drill where you try to pop letter bubbles by finding letters, as fast as possible.
There are two volume settings; the loudest is acceptable for car trips. While it is designed to model a Blackberry or PDA, the green-and-white design and dull LCD screen give it away. It’s a toy. Parents can live without the fear that their youngest is calling the boss or emailing a client on a real smartphone.
Note that clever parents or grandparents have learned a variety of free solutions to children’s inevitable attraction to grown-up tech gear. They’ve learned to unplug an unused qwerty keyboard, give a child an old cell phone (with battery removed for safety) for pretend calls, or use an old wallet, complete with unused and important looking business cards.
But if anyone has any truly embarrassing stories about a bad child-tech combination, now’s your chance to share. Add your tale below.
