[citation][nom]uthacalthing[/nom]My little girl turns 3 in August. In the morning, she runs into the bedroom, grabs my iPhone from the bedside table, climbs up next to me, and starts to play.She unlocks it, turns the volume down so she doesn't wake up Mummy, scrolls through the homescreens, and picks out apps to play. Her favourites are Peggle, Rat On The Run, Numbers (number learning game for kids), Waterslide, Touch4 (A Connect-4 clone), as well as looking at pics and vids of herself in the Camera Roll.After a short learning curve (about a week), she now does all of this without any assistance from me, and I'm still amazed by this. It says a lot of Apple's design team, who've really hit the nail on the head as far as ease of use goes...When I install a new game for her to play, she points to the "loading" icon, and says "wait for the little blue line to go all the way across". Yep, she's not even three yet, and knows what a progress bar is for!Like one of the comments above, I was keying BASIC programs from magazines into my Vic-20 at age 7. When I look at my daughter operating an iPhone, I wonder what kind of mad skillz she and her peers will have by the time their my age...[/citation]
Although impressive for a 3 year old (or nearly that) I think similar things can be seen in smaller animals such as mice. Its merely the beginnings of observation and reaction. A mouse hits a button on accident and sees food fall down. So it keeps hitting it to check if it's coincidence. Enough of these "coincidences" and the child..or mouse in this case has determined that that button or bar does.
I think the current generation of parents sees tech as this education-required activity, when most of it just takes a little tinkering and observation. Many of these same observations and established "rules" in a childs mind are developed outside of tech, but when applied to tech they become a source of fascination for the parent.
At the age of six I was discovering the basics of Algebra (Solving for x in simple equations and such) just by looking at problems and thinking about what they meant and how it applied to different situations. And 10 years later, I do most Algebra in my head without any thought about the "rules" of Algebra, I just know what I'm doing.
Most people who excel at one thing or another are that way because of early education. I had a good vocabulary all through middle school because my parents never dumbed stuff down for me, they treated me like an adult and even at the age of 12 people who talked with me in games and such over chat believed I was in my 20's. The more you're treated like an adult the more you begin to act like one, and develope the clearer thought procesees that signify adulthood.
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