A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter with An iPad

My friend Todd Lappin says: "A fascinating UI experiment. My daughter likes playing with my iPhone, but this was her very first encounter with an iPad. As you'll see, she took right to it... although she too wonders why it doesn't have a camera!"

As Rob Beschizza observes: "The perfect rorschach test for liking or hating the iPad -- a UI so perfect and natural even a kid can use it / a UI so dumbed-down that even a kid can use it."

• [Anonymous]

  everyone is drooling over the magical revolutionary device that will shape the future of computing and entertainment for the non computer litterate but the only ones I see buying iPads are the complete opposite: tech savvy gadgeteers with smartphones, desktops, laptops already in house.

  When all laptops get a detachable, self reliant screen (like Lenovo’s U1 or Always Innovating’s TouchBook) these tablets will go the way of mp3 players and slowly disappear.

• [robulus]

  Ahh. Good thing you checked. You were quite unclear about the argument here.

  My argument is that my home is full of computers, my kid is naturally curious about them, and that prohibiting a little supervised access to them, because of some quite abstract notions of harm they might cause, is pointless and counter-productive.

  What is your fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery!

• [Anonymous]

  Commentor #29 and 50 gets it.

  I have a child and she will not get one of these since a blank sheet of paper and the people around her give enough to work with.

• [AllisonWunderland]

  Or you could watch a 99 yr old and her first encounter:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndkIP7ec3O8

• [Terry]

  “The perfect rorschach test for liking or hating the iPad — a UI so perfect and natural even a kid can use it / a UI so dumbed-down that even a kid can use it.”

  I’d be much happier if my kid stepped over an iPad on his way to play in a puddle.

  • [robulus]

    @Terry, Slowblinker

    Oh noes!!! Its technology!!!! Its killing my kid’s creativity and spirit of adventure!!!!!!!! Kill it with… fists!!!!!!!!

    My 2.5 year old loves and has boundless enthusiasm for technology and TV.

    He also loves and has boundless enthusiasm for kicking a ball with me in the park, and playing on the swing, and, yes, jumping in puddles.

    Screen based activity is going to be an increasingly important part of our lives. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, and people can still lead healthy, active lifestyles AND engage enthusiastically with technology.

    This idea that everyone should spend their days reading Hegel and evenings with a live string quartet really irks me.

    • [Terry]

      Whoa. Wee bit bi-polar, eh? Considering the device(s) I’m sitting in front of, I’m hardly against technology. However, placing an iPad in front of my three-year-old so he could jab his sticky fingers at it would be pretty much the height of stupidity. You may believe that screen based activity is important (I don’t), but I’m sure the indoctrination could wait until kindergarten. And I’m thrilled for your little one and his ‘boundless love’ for TV. I’m sure network and advertising execs are even more thrilled by it.

      The short of it is that there is a place in this world for iPads, as well as there is a place in this world for Hegel. Neither one is in front of a toddler.

      • [holtt]

        Terry, you might find this TED presentation has some unique insights into how you should treat your kids.

        I can’t speak from the presenter’s point of view at the moment, but as a parent of a wonderful 18 year old, I can attest that you shouldn’t treat your kids like they “mustn’t touch!” (unless it’s going to cause harm). And maybe not READ them Hegel, but be sure to leave copies of Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences next to Good Night Moon.

        Also, don’t sweat the sticky fingers. It’s easier to wipe something off early in life rather than put something into someone’s head later in life.

      • [robulus]

        Terry said “Whoa. Wee bit bi-polar, eh?”

        No. No he’s not. And the fact that you think a child would need to be bi-polar to enjoy both physical activity and screen based activity is both puzzling and alarming.

        Anyway, I’m thrilled your three year old doesn’t engage in screen based activity, and hope they enjoy finding out how everyone else on the planet has been relating to technology, once they reach adulthood.

        • [Terry]

          Sorry. Bad choice of word. I blame the lateness of the hour. I was referring to the idiocy of thinking that only technophobes would fail to embrace the idea of toddlers with iPads. It would seem you share this. Good luck.

          @holtt – a TED presentation on how to treat my kids? I really don’t know where to begin, so I’ll just respectfully decline. Thanks, anyway.

        • [holtt]

          The TED presentation is actually by a kid.

        • [robulus]

          Terry said “I was referring to the idiocy of thinking that only technophobes would fail to embrace the idea of toddlers with iPads. It would seem you share this. Good luck.”

          I’m not quite sure what you said, but I think you called me an idiot in there somewhere.

          If your point is simply that iPads are expensive and a toddler might damage one, then fair enough (although she seems to be handling the unit just fine, probably because she’s been taught how to handle similar objects with care).

          But you did say “I’d be much happier if my kid stepped over an iPad on his way to play in a puddle.” And that sounds a little technophobic to me. Or at least pedotechnophobic, which is a useful term I just invented.

  • [slowblinker]

    AMEN Terry. I always make sure my kids know, and experience, the wonderful world outside; one that a video game, iphone TV will never come close to matching.
    Not to say I don’t allow them to play video games or check out my Droid but first and foremost is Mother nature.
    Still, it is interesting to see how she understands the basic operation of the device.

• [Anonymous]

  This child is two. Not two point five, not two and a half, not 30 months. Two. She will continue to be two until she is three.

  That is all.

  • [Anonymous]

    no actually– .5 years @ age 2 and age 3 make a huge difference in development.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Piffle. I was going to request more decimal places.

  • [apoxia]

    Anon, at this stage of a child’s life a month or two can mean big developmental change – the best example I can think of would be in language development. Hence why the age of children this young are still often described as months. Also, for many children, the quarter or the half added to their age means a lot personally for them.

    Why so harsh on the age? I suspect you don’t have kids??

• [Anonymous]

  Might be worth it for Apple to actually watch this video and have toddlers test their products. You can see the very few but simple flaws. She couldn’t open apps if her thumb was on the edge, had problems swiping between pages. This, I guess, also brings up the point that it might not be extremely natural given that she has used the iPhone. I’d be more interested in seeing how a child reacts to the interface for the first time.

• [Terry]

  I wonder if that little girl knew that a kitten was killed when that iPad was purchased.

• [Anonymous]

  What a lovely little girl. So clever and polite too. Well done, Todd Lappin.

• [lizjones]

  Miss Lappin may be the most famous two year old iPad user on the Internet, but she’s far from the only one. The app she is playing with is called First Words: Animals – and you can find over a dozen videos on YouTube made by proud parents showing their young children learning to spell using FirstWords: Animals on iPhones, iPod Touches, and now iPads. Visit http://www.youtube.com/learningtouchapps.

• [Anonymous]

  “a UI so dumbed-down that even a kid can use it”

  So what’s that say about the adult that sees it and says “oooh, I could use that”?

• [vert]

  IDK… I kind of love that she both recognized and got so excited by seeing Sutro Tower more than any other part of this video.

• [Anonymous]

  Dude, please spare that child from too many screen hours, it doesn’t help eye development or anything else.
  I know a kid who played pong and later Pac-man, so many hours a day and now, he is living under Las Vegas in the drainage system. Be careful with screens!
  Cute Kid!

• [royaltrux]

  I’m one of the haters but dang, what if I had had one of these when I was 2+? It is interesting to think of all the wasted brain potential of modern human hominids who lived many years ago including the stone ages. To think that a baby born 10,000 years ago would be fully capable of understanding rocket science or flying a plane but simply lacked the education and technology fascinates me. But this makes me contemplate my wasted developmental potential. If only I had had edutainment and wikipedia on a portable device (or any device) instead of Gilligan’s Island reruns when I was growing up…who would I be today?

  • [royaltrux]

    Has a nice parallel with Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.

    • [rkr]

      Exactly! I was expecting to see “A Young Lady’s Primer” engraved somewhere on the cover. I wonder how long before a steampunk/art version of exactly that is developed and marketing?

  • [dendritejungle]

    “If only I had had edutainment and wikipedia on a portable device (or any device) instead of Gilligan’s Island reruns when I was growing up…who would I be today?”

    You know, in regards to imagination and creativity, this is a good question and one I wonder about a lot. I worry that with so much bright, shiny entertainment just handed to kids today, that they don’t have much need to develop their imagination. Or does it just inspire them to take those worlds further, and make their own? I’ve seen examples of both in my own life, and am curious if researchers have looked into this and if so, what they’ve discovered.

    (Of course, having access to Wikipedia and the wonders of the web in THIS day and age, I can easily find out. ;) But I’d love to know what other BoingBoingers have found.)

  • [Anonymous]

    @royaltrux I’ve thought about this myself – what kind of person would you become if you lived 25, 50 or 150 years ago? The answer is this – the same thing you are now. Of course some professions around today weren’t available yesteryear, but nothing is really new and would just be defined in broader terms.

    So a seven yr-old watching reruns years ago, would use the iPad for games and such – nothing productive. But a seven yr-old who didn’t watch reruns years ago, but read books or played with model rockets, would use the iPad for wikipedia and things of that nature.

    So let’s say an economist says if he lived in the west during the 1900′s he would be a train robber. That’s not possible, he work in some aspect of economics – banker, trader, etc.

    • [memcf]

      @robulus, @Terry:

      Anon here has it right: it’s not the tech, per se, it’s what we do with it — or, with children, what we teach them to do with it. You both seem to be involved parents, which is the important thing, and I’m sure your kids will turn out fine despite your well-meant disagreement over when they ought to be introduced to tech.

      • [robulus]

        Terry started it!

        • [Terry]

          “Terry started it!”

          Actually, Terry made a simple statement about his personal preferences as a parent.

• [Anonymous]

  if we already know that the kid has experience with the iPhone, what’s so impressive about her instant grasp of the iPad’s UI? if anything, it’s a triumph for the design of its predecessor

• [AnthonyC]

  I have no problems with an intuitive, well-formed high-level UI- I think that’s great- but I *also* want to be able to peel that away if I choose to. To dissect and rearrange as needed. Heck, even just to troubleshoot on my own.

• [cymk]

  A kid taking an instant understanding of an iPad/iPhone interface is no surprise; kids point and touch, its natural to them. Hypothetically, if I had kids, and if I could afford an iPad, I wouldn’t let them play with solely because I wouldn’t want them doing exactly what the girl in the video did; jam their stubby digits straight into the screen until it reacted to the touch. Just imagine the pinwheel popping up and the touch screen not responding for a few minutes, and with each passing second your kid his the screen harder and harder trying to make it work.

• [Brainspore]

  “Hey, kid! Stop enjoying that thing!” -Cory

  • [Anonymous]

    +1

  • [IWood]

    lulz

• [KremlinLaptop]

  Dear lord, that’s amazing and somehow amazingly wonderful. I’m firmly in the camp of thinking the iPad is overpriced and useless; but I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this video.

  I’d really like to see where this kid is and what her opinions on technology are twenty years from now. God, I’ll be even more of a crusty old curmudgeon by then.

  • [bwcbwc]

    How about “it looks like an astroturfed video from Apple marketing”. No evidence for or against, it just has that vibe.

• [IronyElemental]

  A Young Ladies’ Illustrated Primer?

  • [Anonymous]

    Form Factor isn’t everything. Until the thing can answer naturally spoken questions with proper grammar and offer related learning material, I don’t think there’s any significant similarity between this device and the primer fro Diamond Age.

• [David Delony]

  Some people felt (and some still do) that the original Mac was “dumbing down” computers too.

• [remmelt]

  Man, she has the attention span of a two year old.

• [Anonymous]

  “so perfect and natural even a kid can use it / a UI so dumbed-down that even a kid can use it”?!

  Of course a kids can use it. The question is is the UI natural enough that even an adult can use it?

• [Anonymous]

  Thing with the Ipad is that there isn´t really anything new about it… I totally agree with Anon: these tablets will go the way of mp3 players and slowly disappear.

• [mn_camera]

  Can you please make a special section for iPad-related posts so the rest of us can see the remaining 15% of the content without having to wade through them?

  • [Nelson.C]

    Nobody’s forcing you to read them, mn_camera. Also, I find your statistics suspect.

    • [mn_camera]

      No, Nelson, nobody is forcing me to read them.

      In fact, as a general rule, I’m not reading them. This one, so far, is one of very few exceptions.

      And I find humor-deprived literalism suspect, and also tedious – close to 100% of the time, in fact.

• [Terry]

  Okay, I’ll say it:

  The Leap Frog LeapiPad?

• [kfunque]

  You may call it so dumbed down that a 2 year old can pick it right up… but I’m still pretty sure my 50 year-old mother would need a few hours of instruction to figure it out.

  “No Mom! First you have to press the button. Yes, that one. Yes, that one. It’s the only button. No, Mom! Shaking it isn’t going to do anything. Now you have to take that screen and slide it. No, with your finger. Don’t tilt it. That doesn’t do anything.”

  • [Anonymous]

    That’s too funny!!! And probably true!

  • [simonbarsinister]

    Coming from someone who’s mother *oiled the cat* I think my mom would need some training too. I’d be afraid she’d try to take clippings from the UI with scissors.

    • [Gilbert Wham]

      Oiled the cat? Full story please. Immediately.

      • [simonbarsinister]

        It sounds more exciting than it is. The cat’s fur looked dry and “frizzy” and she thought it would be helpful to rub baby lotion into it to soften it up.

        When I noticed the cat acting weird I felt the oil. I explained that cats keep their fur clean by licking it and that the cat would be licking the equivalent of several spoonfuls of petroleum-based baby lotion, which couldn’t be too good for it.

        We shampooed the cat until we got most of it out. The cat threw up a a few times so I think it swallowed some of it.

• [Patrick Austin]

  Elitists always hate it when dumb schmucks get access to their power. I have no problem whatsoever with the iPad as the equivalent of a 21st century book.

  A book has a pretty dumbed-down interface. So does a hammer. Hell, so does a car. Computers take longer to figure out than just about any other tool we use. That’s a bug, not a feature.

  I understand some of the hate, but it seems like Apple has created a good first stab at making most of the world’s information accessible to toddlers and people too old to figure out Ubuntu. Weighed against the harm done by locking it down, I still think the iPad is pretty goddamn amazing.

  If it’s capabilities are too limited by Apple’s rules, I’m sure someone will come along and make a better product. People are still free to do that. Just like Android has finally produced a phone that fills the role of universal communication device better than the iPhone. (<– hahah)

  • [AllisonWunderland]

    نخ

    – “A book has a pretty dumbed down interface”

    Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh . . . maybe, if you happen to be literate in that language . . . The book doesn’t read itself.

    البكم الحصول على قوتهم. ليس لدي أي مشكلة على الإطلاق مع تطلب الشركة باعتباره معادلا للكتاب القرن 21st.

    كتاب يحتوي على واجهة جميلة الى اسفل. حتى لا مطرقة. الجحيم ، حتى لا سيارة. أجهزة الكمبيوتر وقتا أطول لمعرفة من مجرد عن أي أداة أخرى نستخدمها. هذا هو الشوائب ، وليس ميزة.

    وأنا أفهم بعضا من الكراهية ، ولكن يبدو أن شركة آبل قد خلقت وطعنة أولى جيدة في جعل معظم المعلومات في العالم في متناول الأطفال الصغار وكبار السن أيضا لمعرفة أوبونتو. موازنة من الضرر الذي ألحقه تأمين عليه ، ما زلت اعتقد أن تطلب الشركة هو ملعون جميلة مدهشة.

    إذا هي قدراته محدودة جدا بقواعد أبل ، وأنا متأكد من أن شخصا ما سوف يأتي على طول وتقديم أفضل المنتجات. الناس لا تزال حرة في أن تفعل ذلك. تماما مثل الروبوت أنتج أخيرا الهاتف التي تملأ دور جهاز الاتصالات العالمية افضل من اي فون.

  • [Roger Wilco]

    “A book has a pretty dumbed-down interface. So does a hammer. Hell, so does a car.”

    I just bought an iCar. The hood is welded shut, I can only fill it up with iGas and drive on certain approved roads but man is it fun letting the dog drive for once.

    • [Rob Beschizza]

      “I just bought an iCar. The hood is welded shut, I can only fill it up with iGas and drive on certain approved roads but man is it fun letting the dog drive for once.”

      Forget the dog: when the car can drive itself, your nightmare will become true.

    • [querent]

      You win the internet today. Good job.

  • [Joe]

    “Elitists always hate it when dumb schmucks get access to their power. ”

    You have it backwards; people aren’t objecting to the ease of use. I think that Apple did a very good job with the UI. However, in this case the elitists are at Apple, since they are not allowing anyone to write and distribute a program (“app”, for the fanboys) that runs on an iPad without their approval. They are setting themselves up as gatekeeper. That’s the elitism: they (Apple) are preventing dumb schmucks (independent programmers and hobbyists) from geting access to their power. They want 30% of the revenue from every app. Furthermore, they are aggressively using their patent portfolio to prevent others from building similar devices (and they are being sued by other would-be monopolists in return).

• [Lobster]

  Is the kid now psychic? Perhaps immortal? I’ve heard that such early exposure to the iPad renders someone more than human.

• [IamInnocent]

  Doesn’t her ease with the iPad have everything to do with her familiarity with her dad’s iPhone and being a smart kid raised to be as smart as she can be?

  Most people are most at ease with Windows than Linux or the Mac, in case you forgot, for that same reason: familiarity… well except that they are not all that smart.

• [Mattz]

  Maybe it’s just me, but the kid seems highly advanced in vocabulary and speech for a 2.5 year old…

  Anyway, we have tablet PCs that advanced children can use. Ender’s Game, here we come :D

  • [BookGuy]

    @Mattz

    I’m consistently amazed at the differences in development of language in different kids, and just how wide a range is considered normal. I’ve met 2-year-olds who only use a few words, and I’ve met other 2-year-olds that are already using simple sentences.

    That said, my 3-year-old niece seems equally contented playing with my brother-in-law’s Android and my iPhone. See? We can all get along, people!

• [Anonymous]

  GREAT experiment, cool video, thanks. If there’s one thing that points to a negative part of the pad it’s the attention span factor. She spends about 15 seconds on each app. Soon she’ll lose interest in everything the pad has to offer, and solve the problem by buying more apps.

• [Anonymous]

  If I dropped several hundred on a gadget like this, there’s no way I’d hand it over to a toddler to play with.

• [syntaxerr0r]

  My daughter started using my iPhone’s photo gallery when she was 10 months old. It took about 30 seconds for her to understand the ‘sliding’ concept. You can’t make a UI any better than that!

• [theevilpuppy]

  Apple may have all the publicity, but so far they are just another player.
  Steve Jobs has yet to conquer the world.
  The iPad is a nice bit of kit, suitable for kids and the young at heart.

  Get over it.

• [rushkoff]

  This is a smart and wonderful kid!
  She can spell LION at 2.5 years? Massive.

  • [Anonymous]

    If you look at the order the letters were selected, you’ll see that the child didn’t spell lion correctly. She matched the shapes correctly which gave that impression.

    I’d like to see one given to a similarly aged child with a poorer background and no previous exposure to an iPhone.

• [DSMVWL THS]

  Just look at her, being psychologically scarred and cruelly deprived, because she can’t unscrew its case or hack its firmware!

• [pecoto]

  Geez….could we please stop comparing this to the “Young Ladies Illustrated Primer” in the Diamond Age. Apparently you guys did not understand the part of the book where the REAL difference in the girls’ lives was a real live human being interacting in real time with a real live human being using a book as an interface. This device DOES NOT HAVE THIS POTENTIAL….it is a slow clunky computer with a huge touchscreen….not the second coming of cyber-jesus. To quote Tycho from Penny-Arcade :”It’s a large, heavy iPhone that can’t make calls. Everything the iPhone excels at, this excels at also, and that includes the acquisition of human grease and filth. Every extended interaction with the device leaves it coated with smears of unknown provenance, like a stripper pole. From a narrative perspective, they’ve gone the wrong way: they’ve made a large, less general purpose device after a smaller, perfect one. You come out with the big one first, and then when you make the one that fits in your pocket, there is a gasp from everyone in the room. You may sense this also, upon using it: the sense that time has begun to flow backward.”

  • [johnnyaction]

    People keep comparing it to the “Young ladies illustrated primer” in Diamond Age because it DOES have the potential to come close to being an early model of this.

    Your argument that it was the “human interaction” done by live actors that made the difference is short-sighted and a bit wrong-headed. If you recall thousands of copies of the primer were made and even being AI only they helped raise a generation of chinese girls on converted freighters. These girls turned into the “Mouse Army” and were able to act as an intelligent cohesive group. I’m sure each of them cherished their own primer and if real, they would vehemently disagree with you.

    The “human interaction” was there to breathe life into the expressions, not to make key decisions regarding the education of the girls. The ‘ractors read lines supplied to them by the primer itself so it was the AI leading and forming the education not human decision. Essentially the human interaction lead to a couple copies of it having high production value but lacking that production value would not make or break a kids education.

    Adaptive teaching software that adjusts to the students level and tries to educate them in their deficiencies and increase their overall skill levels and competencies by going at the student’s own pace is something that we should strive for.

    Just because the iPad isn’t “the primer” yet doesn’t mean it is not an important step along the way to a scary useful teaching device.

• [Redratio1]

  Nice! Smart kid.
  Beats my AppleII I got at that age. To be young and in iPad…sigh…

• [Baldhead]

  AAAARGH! Bloody sick of iPad stories!!!! I swear if they’d spent half their marketing budget on designing this thing better you’d have an actual decent machine instead of an oversized, bloated iPod Touch (not an iPhone that’s actually useful if overpriced)

• [Noobles]

  Where can I download an Ipad filter for my Browser (FF)?

• [SeattlePete]

  This child is more curious about new technology than most of the adults in my life.

• [Anonymous]

  awww, I want a kid and an iPad

• [Anonymous]

  how come a 2 year old can spell words like that? the age told must be wrong. she’s 25! LOL

• [Wuss Brillis]

  There was this other video where they “do the test with a monkey” but the ending was flagged and eventually it was removed.

• [hbl]

  This dude clearly already has an iPhone. My niece has been able to slide to unlock mine since she was 1, and now she’s just over 2, so can slide around the pages, the photos, click the button to get to the home screen. If I gave her an iPad right now, she already understands most of the gestures involved in manipulating it, and would recognise the design, and some of the apps.

  The fact that the girl in the vid says, “ooh there’s a tower!” makes me think he’s got that app on both platforms. Just a thought.

  • [devophill]

    She isn’t recognizing an app, she’s recognizing the background photo of Sutro Tower. Smart kid. (whose father points out cool things like Sutro Tower. I bet she can recognize defunct 707 livery, too.)

  • [Anonymous]

    It’s not an app. The tower is the background image.

  • [mdh]

    So, it’s actually so easy a 1 year old could manage it?

    I wonder who figured out that people liked computers that they didn’t have to be computer scientists to use? I bet he’s rich.

• [holtt]

  Beautiful.

  This really bodes well for some plans to utilize touch screens in general, and perhaps the iPad as well for intellectual developmentally disabled students.

  Good intuitive things work at a very basic brain level for kids. And as far as I know we don’t lose that level as we grow older. It doesn’t mean we only want to do things at a child’s complexity level, but it does mean things built on top of that foundation can be far easier to use for many tasks.

  My favorite example of that was demonstrating a virtual forest display at an academic open house and having Deans and Faculty find it “fascinating, but perhaps too complex for me”. Then a 6 year old boy comes along and goes, “Can I play?” I handed him the mouse and off he went. Take that Mr. PhD. Dr. Smartypants!

• [TheCrawNotTheCraw]

  “Honey, can you say ‘Repetitive Strain Injury’?

  How about ‘Carpal Tunnel Syndrome’?

  No? That’s a tough one. Don’t cry.”

  Seriously, this is an impressive video. While I am critical about Apple in general and the iPad’s features and functionality, it’s hard to not like the form factor.

• [mdh]

  Seems to me that you need to be a computer scientist to not accidentally break a PC (or to just keep it running smoothly), while on the other hand you would need to be a computer scientist to intentionally break an Apple.

  Not assigning merit to either camp, just an observation.

• [middleclass]

  Oh man, these kids are going to do such crazy fucking shit with computing technology. I love it. I started with an Apple II and soon after a IIgs at about 7, but kids now have so much computing power at their fingertips.

• [Teller]

  Bright screen. Bright screen. Bright screen. Bright screen.

  We’re one electromagnetic pulse away from a national nervous breakdown.â„¢

• [aldous]

  I liked telephones a lot more when they had hand cranks, weighed 30 pounds, were bolted to the wall and had operators at the other end of the line.

  You know, before they were dumbed down with push buttons, batteries and this whole ‘wireless’ craze.

• [apoxia]

  I’ve never touched an iphone, let along an ipad. If I picked one up it would take me considerably longer to work it out than this young girl, and I’ve been using computers since I was 8 (I’m 28 now, so no not a late bloomer, my family’s first computer had a black and white screen and a 20mb hard drive).

• [Anonymous]

  Clearly the perfect size for a 2 year old. I’m just sayin’.

• [igpajo]

  See what they didn’t show was at the end when the kid decided she was done, and wanted to play something else, how she just tossed the IPad on the floor, shattering it’s screen.

  Seriously that’s the one thing I worry about with an IPad is how easy would it be to crack the screen. I took a programming class for the Newton when I was in college and I had the thing for 3 days before the backpack I was carrying it in hit a door jam and shattered the screen. Cost me $150. I’d be so paranoid of the same thing happening to something like this. I’d want something like a Wii leash so whoever’s playing with it wouldn’t drop it too.

• [Anonymous]

  I watched my 2.5 yr old grandson take over the iPad this past weekend. He’s used to the iPod Touch, and went straight for the iPad! He loved it, but was disappointed that pictures hadn’t been loaded on it yet.

• [Aloisius]

  It seems quite a few people bought iPads to resell. Over 2k listed on eBay and several hundred listed on my local craigslist today.

• [andygates]

  Great video. It reminds me of loaning my Nokia 770 to a friend’s 4 and 6 year olds: paint program, instant win, and they still pester me for it when I visit.

  Kids “get” tablet interfaces intuitively. Win!

  Also note the moments where the interface doesn’t do what the child wants: she prods and pokes at it. My tableteers stabbed it with the stylus, and there’s supposed to be a similar reaction from adults with a little jink of the mouse that can be captured by UI-tuning nerds.

• [Mim]

  She’s not spelling, she’s matching symbols. Not bad for a 2.5 year old, but also not that unusual. Note on the second word she’s “spelling” that she kind of just drags the letters around till they click into place.

  • [Anonymous]

    I think she is in a way spelling, but just doesn’t know it. Soon something will click and she’ll realize she can spell and has been “doing” it for a while. She’ll feel very proud and confident as a result.

• [Anonymous]

  I can’t stop smiling from the cuteness!

• [Jonathan Golub]

  This reminds me of my experience with the first Atari 2600 emulator for the Mac. I was excited to play it, but each game held my attention for about 10-15 seconds. This will be as pedestrian to her when she’s grown up. Imagine what kind of electronics will she be using when she’s 25…

• [pixelwhip]

  i really really wanna see a monkey / ape (pref. Orangutan) have a play with this… pleaasee!! :)

• [Anonymous]

  well, it’s a kid that (a) already interacts with computer games, and (b) had worked an iPhone. hardly a blank slate!!!

  I’m sure my kid would be fascinated by the touch-screen interfact, but she’d have no idea what desktop icons are or what to do with any of the rest of it, and that’s mainly a reflection of the fact that the only electronic gizmo she’s interacted with is a (regular) digital camera…

  acm

• [boynas]

  “My daughter likes playing with my iPhone, but this was her very first encounter with an iPad.”

  This means that she is used to the UI… Is by no means a good experiment.

  iphone/touch whatever… is the same than the ipad UI isn’t it?

• [adwkiwi]

  You guys are all missing the best bit, when she’s spelling ‘bike’ and the app stutters on the k and says ‘k-k-k’ :)

  Honestly, if the main consequence of the iPad is that people can’t watch a YouTube video any more without picking out the amusing bits, then maybe the haters are right about it ruining the internet :v

• [Terry]

  Let me make sure I’m clear about the argument here.

  1) The technology is so simple and/or well designed that a toddler can use it with ease.

  2) We have to start teaching our kids the technology as early as possible so that it won’t be over their heads when they get older.

  Makes perfect sense.