I have a dice app on my mobile phone. You can different dice – 6-sided, 4-sided, etc. – and also flip coins. My three-year-old son likes playing with this app and today he decided that he only wanted coins on the screen. There were, however, two dice still there. He came to me to get rid of them, and as I was in the middle of cooking dinner, I told him he had to first press the minus sign, and then tap the items he wanted removed. Unfortunately, his initial stabs hit adjacent coins, causing them to disappear. I was just about to say I would help him shortly, when, to my amazement, I saw him drag the coins that were overlapping the die away from the area before successfully tapping the die to remove it.

The thing is, he has never been shown how to use the touch screen, he just did something to solve the problem in a way that seemed appropriate to him. And it worked! In fact, this is more often the case than not, so it is a pity that more adults don’t have a stab and see if it works. A less complicated view of technology use could help us all perhaps.

If only adults saw it this way…

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