Child-proof Touchscreens

We are using a tablet computer for education for our 3 year old daughter.  Mostly right now, she is learning simple stuff, like numbers and names of objects.  One nice thing about touchscreen devices is that they have a much shallower learning curve for people with poor coordination than other computer devices.  This makes them ideal for children.  Our daughter's experience confirms this.


I just finished reading this article: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865580442/Touchscreens-and-toddlers-The-research-is-mostly-good-news.html  It discusses using touchscreen devices for children.  It also references some good studies on the subject of how touchscreen devices affect children.  One surprising thing I learned from the article is that many parents allow their children to play with their smart phones or tablets when they need to be free from distractions (while shopping for instance).  It talks briefly about a child who figured out how to unlock a smart phone at 8 months old.  Studies have shown that touchscreen time for young children, even this young, can have positive effects.  The article says that studies suggest that limited time with close supervision is best, and it can be especially effective if the parents are directly involved.  Evidently (and as I have suspected and observed) touchscreen devices are excellent learning tools for children that are too young to have enough coordination to use traditional computers.

This article got me thinking about more widespread use of touchscreen devices as learning tools.  Even the cheapest tablet computers available are powerful enough to run most learning applications.  The problem is that they are fragile.  Near the end of the article, one parent is quoted as saying that one reason they limit the time their child spends on the tablet or smart phone is that it tedious to have to clean the drool off of the expensive device.  (Note that limiting time is a good thing, but drool on the device is probably not.)  This is the same thing I am worried about with our daughter.  She does not drool on it, but the device cost several hundred dollars, and she does not understand that it is fragile and needs to be kept clean.  At this point, she is just too young to understand this, and it can be assumed that other children her age or younger will also not understand this.  So, do we just keep risking it, hoping that we get lucky, or do we deny our daughter the opportunity for very good early brain development to potentially save a few hundred dollars?

I would like to suggest that someone needs to start making small (somewhere between 4 and 7 inch) tablets designed with children in mind.  These would be water tight (not just water resistant; kids like to drop things in bathtubs and toilets), with impact resistant screens.  The shell would also need to be impact resistant, because children often drop things, or worse, I have a brother who had a fetish with stepping on things when he was very young (I am lucky he did not break my laptop screen).  I am not suggesting that they need to be military combat grade materials, but I think that current designs could be improved on a bit to make more child safe designs.  Given the potential benefits these devices have for learning, I think that a small, lower performance, cheap tablet that can handle common educational games would be a good seller.  These devices could even be marketed to schools (some of which are already spending over half a grand a pop on IPads).  If these could be produced cheaply enough, some schools might even consider buying every student one.  I am certain that many parents would buy at least one, if not one for each of their children.

Anyhow, these studies that show benefits for judicious use of touchscreen computers for educating young children make a very good marketing platform for these devices, but if they are not child safe, many people will shy away because of the risk of expensive damage.  I sincerely hope that someone with some influence reads this and makes it happen, because we are homeschooling our children, and having a few damage resistant devices like this would really help.

Lord Rybec