There are a lot of exciting “firsts” for a new parent: Experiencing the sound of your child’s first word, their first steps, first time they eat with a spoon, first time they tell a joke, first time wearing “big boy” underpants, first dream, first drawing… but what can possibly compare to watching your child use a mouse all by themselves and navigate the web for the first time?
Tonight Miles grokked the causal relationship between moving your hand over “here” and the cursor moving across the screen “there” and was able to surf all by himself from the Jay-Jay site to the Arthur site, then from there through a whole stack of Arthur trading cards (which was kind of odd, since he’s not into Arthur at all).
Clicking was kind of tough – I had to hold the mouse in place while he pushed the button, to avoid accidental dragging. But he was positively beaming and giggling, and so was I.
I can remember clearly how proud I was when Clara started using the mouse by herself — she was just 3, I think. I was busting out with pride when she started clicking around Sesamestreet.com by herself. The mouse hand-eye coordination just popped out one day — and very quickly thereafter, she also quickly mastered the various menu hierarchies of the site. It’s amazing to see this computer literacy emerge, well before actual literacy!
Dylan, do you mean she could read the menu hierarchies at age 3? Or were they pictorial? That’s pretty amazing.
Scot, my kid uses a trackball which nicely avoids this “accidental dragging” issue…
My 4 month old was using it last night. I have to say he wasn’t using it in a sense of visually using it and tracking it on screen, but he understood that you move it around on the pad for some reason. Monkey see Monkey do I guess.
Its true, seeing your kid doing something that you see a lot of adults have problems with is amazing! My two year old, even before his second birthday, had already figured out how to move the chair to mommy and daddy’s desk, get up on it, and pound on the keyboard. No big deal…until someone left notepad open, and in his banging became overly excited at the characters on the screen. Now he SCREAMS “Type! Type!” And we have to stop whatever we’re doing (on the computer or not) and open notepad for him, and let him type away. He goes 1-10, then A-Z, then types his name and other words that he knows. To clear the screen, he hits enter enough times, then starts over. Since his first birthday he’s had a fascination with numbers and letters, even seems to dream about them because he wakes up in the morning and very sleepily says “1, 2, 3…”
The mouse is just a toy right now, he just moves it to get it out of his way, but i’m trying to teach him that when he moves his hand, the cursor on screen works, it shouldn’t be that foreign of a concept to him since he understands how the keyboard works, but with the keyboard sitting right in front of him its too big of a distraction to get him to try to use the mouse. You really can’t underestimate your kids, its amazing what they’re little sponge-like absorbent brains can do!