Today, parents feel pressured to use technology to begin the education of their children in the womb. For example, BabyPlus Prenatal Education System promises to "give your child an advantage" of rhythmic patterns to stimulate early learning. It 's time, then, step back and take the true value toys to teach the technique.
Toys that are made of semiconductor chips with embedded high-tech electronics commonly known asEdutainment toys. The quality and substance of their representation may be limited number of buttons can be pushed through a child. Some promise to a child, allowing him to interact with educational content to learn a challenge. offers Thus, for example, V. Smile Baby Infant Development system designed to introduce interactive learning for children from 9 months to 3 years. You can watch videos with this educational system buttons or on a tray to influence what happens on a TVScreen.
Some older games are also adding electronic bells and whistles for children appeal to the current generation of technologically sophisticated. Dolls interact with the Internet. Wooden Brio trains make electronic sounds and can be controlled by infrared remote controls. The classic Fisher-Price Rock-A-Stack now also in a version of Dance Dance Baby, whose center rod lights up and plays songs when the rings are stacked on them.
Open vs. closed Toys
Atoy encourages open play for free with unlimited results. For example, a building will be used to construct a series of different structures. A Toys closed, on the other hand, has a limited and often soon exhausted the results.
Not all toys are closed badly. After all, a truck turned a classic educational toy: it can be shared in a fair to put. However, to resolve a wallet, a child needs to develop and use logic and finemotor skills. The child benefits from the rematch with the pieces of a stacker, manipulating them or your fingers over and over and think about how they fit together until the solution dominates, and then repeated for pleasure.
A closed edutainment toys, the other party may need to press one child, some buttons. Finally, it leads to a dead end and the child gets bored and throws the toy aside. As Martha B. Bronson notes in The Right Stuffbirth to eight children, even if a child has a rich gaming experience with every toy, Basic, open toys encourage this type of experience more than rigidly programmed toys with only one or two functions to do. This type of edutainment toy is not timeless. And 'to be replaced as soon as possible the next big thing in edutainment product that the latest technological innovations in applications.
Often people assume that new technology is used by more toystechnological innovation and educational institutions, not as educational toys. Indeed, specialists such as Jane Roberts (President of Young Media Australia, a consumer advocacy group), these children as an educational and interactive-tech edutainment toys really high notes, [p] Ressing and key elements to do with that "what has been rather limited in terms of how children learn." In addition, many traditional toys are still the most innovativePromoting a child's imagination and creativity, without electronics in them. For example, the blocks in the game FoxMind Clik for a variety of games for children and adults are equally difficult to use.
The negative effects of Edutainment Toys
Overall, parents may wish to encourage those children, especially younger ones, too often, edutainment toys, which include screens for televisions and computers. The authors of "Effects of television in preschoolLooking first grade children, "found that preschoolers who watch TV more than their peers have seen worse in school and have not been socialized, as well established when they entered the first grade. Researcher Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, the kids watch Baby Einstein DVDs and videos scored lower on language skills of children who had never seen before.
Moreover, Allison Sloan notes in Shopper's Guide healthier, cleaner and toys that computersTVs emit electromagnetic fields ", invisible force fields, possible health effects of headache, visual disturbances, cancer, sleep is the subject of heated debate." Children develop their brains are most threatened by such outside influences.
A final caution about edutainment toys is that encouraging children to an acceptance of a consumer culture. A timeless toy, how to conduct a series of wooden blocks of units can be in heavy use for generations and playedboth with children (and adults!) a variety of age. Edutainment toys, on the other hand, are usually time playing with only one child in one, and usually have a shorter season and long life. Children learn quickly and get bored, or break their high-tech components, making it useless toy, and then are discarded, toxic chemicals and metals into the environment.
What parents can do
As permeate technology and the InternetSociety and people's lives more and more, it makes sense for kids, computers and other inventions, they need to use as down aging. A toy is not necessarily bad or useless, because it meets the art. That is, smart parents stated purpose must be considered an edutainment toy, evaluate how and what it teaches, and determine whether their children Could Get Greater or equal value from a simple, classic toy. Roberts warns of the dangers of a parentHigh-tech toys such as baby sitting, and replace the interaction with a machine as a single player game for PC, which "should be the best learning for children with real life experience when creating the model for the exploration and develop their own initiatives to play through. "