For a long time the TV has been a child minder for
young children and there is some attempt to provide programs with some
educational value. Computers have also moved into this role and would seem to
have more potential than the TV as they can be interactive. Touch screens seem
to be at natural form of input to 3 and 4-year olds as the finger marks on the
screens in the homes of youngsters will attest to.
A paper by Subial et al entitled “The Ghosts in the
Computer: etc.” grabbed my attention and became a must read (1). It was,
however, focused on a study of young kids chasing pictures around a touch
screen monitor in the order that the computer wanted them too. They were
rewarded with flashing lights; no candy or toys were handed out as prizes.
If the kids had some verbal training, they did
pretty well. But on the other hand if they had to figure out what would gratify
the computer without any training, they could be classed as dismal
failures. If a human demonstrated what
they had to do, they got it in one.
The conclusion was that kids learn better from an
adult than a computer. Good news for teachers as it doesn’t look like replacing them with an
iPad is going to be effective.
Like all good social psychology experiments, the
trials had to be followed by surveys of all the participants. There was a strong consensus that the computers
weren’t simply inanimate objects but that there was a degree of animacy lurking
inside lurking inside.
I know exactly how they feel sometimes when my
computer deletes the wrong file or my word processor corrects a word that I’ve
just typed into something quite inappropriate without any input from me. Just
like the majority of users, I know that training me isn’t the answer. What I
need is a good reliable method to exorcise the ghosts in my computer.
