Predictability

Tom (11.99 months old) is getting to the stage now where he’s starting to combine things, to see what happens. There’s all kinds of fun to be had. Wooden blocks clack together, but don’t stick. A ball placed on another ball falls off, but a ball placed on a large plastic ring (or on the donut-like opening of my computer’s sub-woofer) centres itself and stays there in a very satisfying way. So satisfying in fact, that it seems essential to take it out and put it in again… and again… and again.

That’s how babies minds work, I think, they thrive on discovered predictability. It’s not enough to try something once to see what happens, you have to do it again to see if what happened still happens. Then do it a dozen or so more times just to really be sure. While I watch Tom doing it, I can almost hear the little neurons in his bonce strengthening by repeated use.

Tom’s at an age where he’s still learning about the basic physical properties of the world around him, and predictability is important. Balls bounce, wheels roll, blocks stack or tumble.

One of Tom’s Christmas presents was an electronic activity centre. The V-Tech “My First Steps Walker”, a baby walker with a panel on the front featuring an electronic cornucopia of lights and buttons for little fingers to press. I’m a gadget freak, so it’s actually to my surprise that, where toys are concerned, I’ve become a bit of a Luddite. Because for all its electronic wizardry, the My First Steps Walker isn’t predictable, and that makes me question its value as a toy for very small kids.

Press the blue circular button marked with a “1” and a friendly lady’s voice will say “one!”, but press it again and it says instead “blue circle!”. So is the little tyke supposed to learn that blue circular buttons say “one”, or that buttons marked “1” say “blue circle”?

It gets worse than that; flip the wings of the yellow plastic butterfly and the whole gadget changes function. Now it’s not “teaching” about shapes and colours and numbers, it’s teaching about “music”. The blue circular button doesn’t say “blue” or “circle” or “one”; now it says “rock and roll!”, and launches into the least rock-and-roll bit of music you’ve ever heard.

Now, I know eventually Tom will need to learn that things aren’t predictable, and that most buttons on electronic gadgetry do different things at different times. Eventually, probably sooner rather than later, he’ll work out that a computer can do an infinite number of things with just a few dozen buttons. But first, I think, he needs the predictability. He need to press the blue circular button and for it to say “blue circle!” every time, so that he delights in the fact that he predicted it was going to say that.

I wouldn’t take the V-Tech walker away from him, because he enjoys bashing away at it, particularly the spinny cogs bit. But I don’t think it’s really teaching him much yet, and I’d much rather he spent an instructive 5 minutes repeatedly dropping the same ball into the same hole. Unpredictability can wait.