Designing Websites for Kids · 2 March, 02:04 PM
My 5 year old daughter wanted to use the computer yesterday. She’s only recently shown a big interest – I’d gotten a copy of Baby Type on Nick Bradbury’s recommendation, and that’s a fun program for toddlers, but for a kid who’s in Kindergarten and learning to read, it’s a little remedial. My wife recently purchased copies of Clifford Thinking Adventures and Clifford Reading, and my daughter’s loved those, but yersterday, she was wanting to some of the games on Sprout Online. Watching Elaina work, I noticed a few things:
- Double-clicking can be tough for a little kid to get the hang of.
- Scrolling can really confuse a kid, especially on screens with multiple scrollable areas: the main screen scrolls, then there are internal divs that scroll, etc.
- Young kids don’t really get the idea of links. They tend to want to click on images, and get confused by things like an image with a link next to it. The image draws their attention, not the text.
- For kids who aren’t proficient readers yet, alt tags on images provide really useful hints – if you can have them spoken to the kid when they mouse over an image. I’m not usually a big advocate of Flash, but this is one area where Flash could really help you. Sprout Online has some links with audio that tell you what they are when you click on them, having that audio cue when you mouse over would be a big help to kids who can’t read, or aren’t yet proficient.
— Gordon Weakliem
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Start her on SICP. The earlier the better I say.
— Noel Welsh · Mar 3, 04:43 AM · #