islandhippy

A screenshot of Duck Duck Moose's "Wheels on the Bus" app for the iPhone.

On Saturday I attended a talk by Dr Warren Buckleitner, the editor of Children’s Technology Review, a monthly consumer reports-style publication dedicated to children’s technology products. And ... take a deep breath ... I got to play with an iPad! Dr Buckleitner's iPad. Both the iPad and Dr Buckleitner's talk were equally inspiring and I was fascinated to learn about the latest children’s technology products on the market, good and bad. Older kids (er, me) can now scuba dive with Wii using a remote in each hand to replicate swimming strokes and discover hundreds of fish. Brush your hand against a fish and you can read information about it. Thanks to augmented reality technology, hold a baseball card up to your webcam and see a three-dimensional image of the player come to life on the screen. Let the kids use an iPhone or iPad to hunt for, and learn about, colours by shooting photos of different coloured objects around the house which the app's colour wheel recognizes or rejects until they've collected all the colours in the game. Since attending the talk I've already purchased two apps for Olive to play on my iPhone and she loves them. Both are produced by Duck Duck Moose, a developer of educational apps for the iPhone and iTouch, which presumably now run on the iPad. Olive bursts into laughter when she plays "Wheels on the Bus" and she loves counting the fish on "Fish School". I haven't quite convinced Sandy we need an iPad but I'm working on it.