This past weekend has been interesting in terms of seeing Aidan interact with technology. First, while chatting with Grandma, she was getting him to move the mouse to various places on her face (her nose, her head, etc). Now, I had never seen Aidan try to do this before — and he was doing it with very little problem. Adding to the level of difficulty is that he was using a trackball !
The next day I was sitting on the sofa with my Eee and he crawled up on my lap. On a whim, I tried to find some Flash game for him to play (since that’s where kids games seem to have gone) and found the incredible companion site to one of Aidan’s favourite shows (and ours): Peep and the Big Wide World. That site has a number of different games, some of which were easy for Aidan, some of which were harder. His favourite game was one where you made Quack jump on one of three tubes of paint (each of a different colour) to squirt paint onto a fence. The goal was to combine the primary colours to match the colour on the card that Chirp was holding up. Aidan’s favourite part of the game was making Quack jump on a nearby hose, which causes water to go everywhere, cleaning up the fence and soaking Chirp in the process. And, as any fan of the show knows, Chirp hates water.
That time, Aidan was using the touchpad on the little Eee.
*I* can’t use the trackpad reliably well. Although I suspect it has something to do with the size of the pad compared to the size of my hands. :)
After a blog post from Kerry, I started in earnest looking for a real video game appropriate for Aidan. I was originally thinking about the DS, what with it supposedly being a kid’s game system. But then I was picking through the racks at the Superstore and saw some Wii games that might be appropriate too. After picking some up … and putting them back, I headed home to do some research.
Video games for the pre-school crowd are just not *there*, you know?
But consistently one stood out, and on Monday Aidan and I wandered up to Toys R Us and purchased “Diego Safari Rescue” for the Wii.
I’ll write a real review of this soon, but suffice it to say that it’s gone over quite well. And … Aidan’s conquered this control system too.
I continue to be astonished at what a different life Aidan is having (and will have) compared to what Gwen & I have had.