iPad - drawn by me

Yesterday afternoon I was playing with my 2 year old nephew. He is a right little terror – full of joy, happiness, expressions, emotions and used to getting his own way. And like other 2 year old kids, he is highly inquisitive and he uses his senses, in a way that we adults sometimes forget, to make sense of the world around him.

We made cupcakes together and he was touching, smelling, looking, tasting and listening. We sat down to read a book and he was touching, looking, listening, tasting (when the book went in his mouth) and smelling (when he wanted more cupcakes). We sat down at the computer whilst I checked an email or two and he touched the screen. Not haphazardly in a ‘stop that, I can’t see what I’m doing’ kind of way but a ‘my mum has an iPhone and when I touch the screen things happen’ kind of way.

I realised that for him and his generation, using touch to control a computer will be as commonplace as the mouse and keyboard have been for us.

Nothing happened when he touched the monitor screen as I don’t have a touch screen monitor but he had learned that touching a screen, albeit the iPhone, made something happen. He had watched his mum use the iPhone, he had learned that she touched it with her fingers and he had copied this to achieve a similar effect. I can’t possibly begin to understand what is going on in a 2 year old’s head but I do know that his actions were an outcome of learning what someone else had done.

Will the iPad become as ubiquitous a device as the PC in schools and homes around the country in the years to come or will it become a passing fad? Something tells me, with the launch of the iPad coming up this weekend in the US and later this month in the UK, that we will probably find out sooner rather than later. Although I can safely state that I will be buying one and can’t wait until my nephew ‘learns by touching’ some more.