Teaching a 3-Year-Old to Program Without a Computer Screen
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This thing seems pretty cool. On the whole, we probably need to have more of an awareness of how important tactile and spatial factors are in child development. But the top selling point, according to this reviewer, is that it protects your child from the "screen time" bogeyman? Spare me.
Edit: And for the bogeyman's sake, if you'd like the "proof", that's what Google is for. This isn't some fringe view. It's about the same as asking me for proof that smoking is damaging.
I love to sit down and actively watch (i.e. point, name, discuss) a show with my 3 y/o son. When not excessive, I feel this is good for both of us.
While I also agree that it doesn't feel wrong to experience something on a screen as a family, we should always be wary of "it feels good/right" as a reason for believing that something isn't bad for you in the long run. That's a slippery slope that has led to plenty of negative trends recently. It's far too easy for people to latch onto things that are good in moderation and let those things slip into over-saturation.
The main source for recommending limitations on overall screen time for young children seems to be a set of recommendations published by the American Academy of Pediatrics [1], but they don't actually cite any research (or their citations are too well-hidden for me). The AAP recently published a release stating that new recommendations are coming soon and suggesting that the old guidelines are unnecessarily rigid and unrealistic, even to the point of explicitly stating that "The public needs to know that the Academy’s advice is science-driven, not based merely on the precautionary principle.". The top bullet point is "media is just another environment". This newer document generally advocates a nuanced approach that takes the nature of the content or activity as well as the social context of media consumption (e.g. whether parents are actively watching with the child) into account [2].
[1]: https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-ini...
Basically, you program a sequence of commands FORWARD, LEFT, RIGHT. There is also a special command FUNCTION that executes a user-specified sequence of up to four commands.
Does it allow the FUNCTION command within the definition of the function? If it does, there's a lot of non-trivial stuff with recursion to do
For instance, a stack overflow
commands = [FUNCTION]
function = [FUNCTION, FUNCTION]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak
Big Trak also could fire it's "laser" programmatically.
My kids love it today - age 3 and 7. (Ok, I bought it used, since my parents had long ago donated mine to goodwill. Still, 35 year old toy works great.)
witness:
http://www.toysrus.com/products/luxury-strollers.jsp
http://www.thebump.com/a/25-hottest-baby-products
do you know how much these kinds of people spend on their babies? it's astronomical.
I also don't think the people who buy this buy it as the only toy for their kid. They probably already have spent plenty on other stuff.
you're projecting your own financial situation onto others in the demographic buying disposable $180 doo-dads for their kids.
it's like getting mad at the rain.
Unicorn idea: As soon as you feel you have too much stuff/outgrown it, you give it to my startup that takes your hand-me-UPs! and cleans them and sorts them and then posts them to our tinder-like UI where you can browse based on categories and your "discovery prefs" are your kids age... you then look through a range of various baby hand-me-ups and swipe right to add to cart and have shipped to you.
you can return them later and if they are in good enough condition, you get a restock credit (think CrossRoads in SF (your lady friend may know this store)....
And yeah - why do you think diapers.com and Jessica Alba are all trying to get into the market...
I thought $180 seemed like a lot but it does look like you get a lot of stuff (including a simple robot).
A toy lawn mower, a wooden toy train set, a toy truck, and maybe another one or two toys is already pushing $100, most of which end up in a bin to be barely played with after the first day.
There's a nice write up on this in an article in the Communications of the ACM: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/3/183598-reaching-a-broad....
I'd really like to see where this goes, some videos of kids playing with it, some studies done to determine if the kids get out of it what the founder (Filippo Yacob) thinks they will.