Four Year Olds and Technology
A few days ago I read this article about one guys use of his iPad and a particular app called Penultimate.
I’ve known about Penultimate since I first got my first iPad but never bothered to download the app. The very reason I love technology is that it gets me away from paper and pen metaphors so while it looked beautiful and had great reviews, it wasn’t really my cup of tea.
But this morning, on a whim I downloaded it, and played briefly with it. As it’s a Friday (family day) everyone was still in bed and Abigail saw me play with it. Immediately she grabbed the iPad out of my hand and began to scribble. She started flipping through pages in the notebook, changing pen colors and played with the eraser. And then started writing the alphabet.
I loved watching her take to this new app with zero friction as she was writing out her ABCs with her finger. After a couple of minutes, she’d started her own notebook! This is a four year old! (though she could unlock our iPhones before she was two, and she does have two tech parents so she comes by it naturally I guess).
Well I was so proud of her first alphabet I posted it to twitter with this tweet.
My 4 year old wrote out her first alphabet this morning thanks to @cocoabox’s wonderful app penultimate. http://cl.ly/3A3h1n2F2F0p3u2U0Y3u
I thought my parents would get a kick out of Abi’s alphabet. But apparently someone else did! To my great delight, the author of Penultimate tweeted back:
@Alyn That is incredibly cute. We’re honored.
But then I got thinking… wouldn’t it be cool if I could add my own “paper” to the journals? After a quick poke around my hunch was confirmed.
I fired up Keynote, made a custom sized piece of paper as a template for Abigail to learn her alphabet better (she got stuck on a few letters):
A few moments later I imported it into Penultimate. Abi loved it and off she went, writing more letters. My wife soon picked up on what was going on, downloaded it to her iPad and showed it to a friend we had over for breakfast.
As it’s family day, we all went off to the movies together to see Mr Popper’s Penguins which our 4 year old loved and our 2 year old got through. When I got out of the theatre, there were a few tweets about Abi’s alphabet which made me smile.
Andreas Ødegård from Norway picked up on my tweet this morning and wrote his own comments about penultimate. He went one step further and created much better templates than I did (you can download them from his site). It gave me no end of joy to think about the ripples this piece of software caused in my own little world.
If you own an iPad, for $1.99 you could have your own little piece of magic too. Though I’m not a pen and paper kind of note taking guy, I can totally see me incorporating this piece of software into my workflow (I sketch out enough on the back on envelopes to make it worth my while for example). So much so, I added a stylus to my Amazon wish list (with Father’s day and a birthday coming up, I’m sure I’ll get lucky!).
It’s little things like this app, the iPad and Twitter that makes me love technology.
