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From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.kids
Subject: Re: Writing befor reading
Message-ID: <654@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-Nov-83 08:17:36 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.654
Posted: Mon Nov 28 08:17:36 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 29-Nov-83 06:07:23 EST
References: <2406@ncsu.UUCP>, <2794@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
Lines: 23

re: typing into a screen editor

I'm pretty skeptical about this.  For one thing, the print size on my
screen is pretty small, and small children need to see big print.
(Doman has us starting with 5 inch tall letters in red.)  The second
problem is that a small child has trouble with the individual keys
on the keyboard.  My son loves to type, but he mostly types by leaning
the heel of his hand on the keyboard and letting the keyboard auto-repeat.
Efforts to get him to use one finger and hit one key so far have been
futile.  I don't know the age at which he'll be able to handle keys,
but that TI commercial (why are they still advertising?) shows a 3 year
old just learning to hit one key.

Doman claims a child can read BEFORE HE CAN TALK.  I'm not sure I completely
believe this, since it's nearly impossible to measure comprehension,
but I do think training the visual pathway to read should be no harder
than training the audio pathway to understand speech (maybe even easier -
OCR is easier than speech recognition for a machine) and there's no
doubt that a 1 year old can understand a good deal of speech.

Given a bitmapped terminal into which you can load a very large font,
and either a child who can use a keyboard or a mouse and a keyboard
drawn on the screen, a screen editor might be interesting to try.