A Toddler’s First iPad Encounter
Hoping to capture her initial reactions, Todd Lapin had his camera ready when he first showed his iPad to his 2.5-year-old daughter. Aside from being cute, the footage is interesting for what it shows us about which aspects of the iPad interface are intuitive and which are less so. The clip also hammers home just how standard and ubiquitous this technology will become for the next generation.
What is intuitive? You don't mean innate, right?
Intuitive might mean something like "deeply learned." There are plenty of things that are perfectly intuitive to adults that are not the least bit intuitive to a small child.
For example, it is intuitive for me to look to my left as I cross the street. That goes WAY back. But a couple years ago, I realized that I was automatically looking to my right on some streets -- entirely appropriately. After nearly a decade of living in New York city, I had learned -- without realizing it -- that my as to which direction to look was the direction that the parked cars on my side of the street came from.
Totally intuitive. But totally learned.
And that says nothing about the kind of rewiring that the brain does on its own through puberty and adolescence. There can be innate things that do not show up until later, such as the sex drive.
So, it is not really clear to me what we learn about intuitiveness from watching a toddler play with an iPad.
Maybe we learn a little about how to think about what intuitive really means. :-)