I thought this was interesting:
"She found selecting, moving and orientating the photos very intuitive using natural gestures. She took a little guidance to get a handle on photo resizing but by the time she’d played for 15 minutes she had got to grips with it and could shrink and enlarge the photos with relative ease."
So moving images was easy and resizing them was hard. 15 minutes seems like a long time for a 4 year-old to learn a skill like that relatively well.
I think the conclusion you can draw from this, and the rest of the article, is that she could quickly do things that behaved exactly as they do in the real world (e.g. pushing a picture across a table), but things fell apart as soon as a new action had to be learned. That's why some of the actions seemed "intuitive," because they fit exactly into previous experience. I wonder if it would have been easier for her if they had played the "stretch a newspaper comic with silly putty" game a few days before.
After watching the video, I think the problem she had in resizing is not because it isn't intuitive, but because it required more delicate movement. The same reason it would be harder for her to twist a screw driver than to hit a hammer.
Having played with one of these, and knowing how it works under the hood, it's more likely that she just didn't have the technique right. Surface prefers you use single fingertips as points of control; Isobel was using her entire hand.
I remember when the multi-touch first came out and everybody was excited. Few years and thousands of iphones have passed and the only "revolutionary" thing we can do with it is still zoom-in and zoom-out pinching pictures.
I am quite amazed by the resistance people have when thinking about HDI: take the multitouch pad on the new mac, for instance. I love it, but why there isn't even a way to do something like middle mouse button?
The problem is that a real large multi-touch device is not yet on the market (the Surface doesn't count due to the pricing). The iPhone may be multitouch, but being able to fit more than two fingers onto the screen and still be able to see anything is a challenge.
It's not just for browsing (FF let you close tabs and open new ones too when you middle click on a link). For instance it is instrumental if you want unix-like copy and paste, to which I am addicted by now.
Don't you just have your other hand on the keyboard all the time anyway? Set FF to open everything in tabs, so that's solved, and then use cmd+: w to close windows, q to quit, c to copy, v to paste, etc etc... they're all right there under your non-trackpad fingers.
I didn't even use middle-click back before wheel mice (when they literally had 3 buttons).
I was at TNRIS, a Texas GIS conference, and MS had a Surface there. I admit it was really cool to fly through Virtual Earth imagery with it, but it was pretty buggy. After a few minutes of light use I managed to freeze the interface, crashing the surface service, subsequently sending the machine back to the Vista desktop.
Unfortunately, this is my typical experience with most Microsoft software products.
This is somewhat tangential to the story, but I think virtual painting, while novel, deprives a young child of the sensory experience necessary at that age.
Paints and paper are also an abstract technology, and time spend working on paper takes kids away from walking and other physical, outdoor experiences. Obviously it can go too far, but most of us feel that painting and drawing and writing and reading have become part of the appropriate mix of experiences for children in our culture.
Computers are no different. I do make sure my toddler spends almost all her time away from glowing screens, but I also remember that I first really got into computers over twenty years ago by spending hours with MacPaint. My daughter is growing up in a world where her parents work all day on computers, play on computers, and talk to friends and family through computers. She's going to be influenced by that, and I'd like it to be as an active participant and not just an observer.
Also in my experience, kids are less interested in computers than we were precisely because they are so ubiquitous.
Back to the original artice: We ruined my 2 year old by letting her play with an iPhone (which she can handle perfectly well - find videos, look at photos as she pleases). Now she expects every screen to be multi-touch. I haven't tried her on the mouse - I figure technology will soon catch up with her expectations :-)
The existence of computers, and increasingly realistic behavior of hardware and software, does not deprive anyone of anything. Rather, raising children entirely on Surface and TV, or with no technology at all, leaves them ill-prepared for the real world.
I'm hoping to expose my children to all kinds of technology. I hope they come away from these experiences with the same sense of wonder and awe as I do. But I'm still planning on cleaning finger paint off the walls.
When our kid was 2 and a few months we set him up with an old-school touchscreen. He had no problem playing games that would be hard for a 3.5 yr old with a mouse. May not sound like much, but a year at that age is huge, and even at 4, as the article states, kids are just barely getting the hang of a mouse. By 4, our kid was a mouse jockey. Transitioning from touchscreen to mouse was trivial.
So moving images was easy and resizing them was hard. 15 minutes seems like a long time for a 4 year-old to learn a skill like that relatively well.
I think the conclusion you can draw from this, and the rest of the article, is that she could quickly do things that behaved exactly as they do in the real world (e.g. pushing a picture across a table), but things fell apart as soon as a new action had to be learned. That's why some of the actions seemed "intuitive," because they fit exactly into previous experience. I wonder if it would have been easier for her if they had played the "stretch a newspaper comic with silly putty" game a few days before.