Teaching Computers to Toddlers and Young Adolescents

Cameroon is a small country, yet its educators have made the decision to change its method of teaching in nursery and primary schools to include lessons in information and communication technology. School officials from 10 of Cameroon's provinces attended a 2 day seminar in which the importance of computer education was agreed upon and the implementation of an ICT program was settled on.

Part of the reason for this decision is the increasingly popular belief that a child's potential will never be realized if they are not given the opportunity to keep up with the world's ever changing technology, especially that of computer-related technologies. Lessons for these children will include the basics of computer operation, including the different components. There is an expectation that they will have a thorough knowledge of the workings of a computer and how to properly use it by the time they finish primary school. The greatest benefit, perhaps, will be the child's ability to effectively filter out useless information in the way that a computer does.

The biggest problem that these schools will face in implementing this computer training program is that most of the schools do not have enough computers to use, even in the basic education process. It has thus been decided that illustrations will be used for teaching the younger children as many educators feel that they may be more inclined to be attentive to pictures than computers. Each teacher will be required to undergo extensive computer technology training if they wish to remain in a teaching position under this new initiative.

In Scotland, studies were done on the affects of video games on a child's ability to learn efficiently. The results of this study indicated that video games actually improve a child's chances of doing well in school, particularly in mathematics.

32 schools in Scotland were studied and experiments were conducted by Learning and Teaching Scotland. Each student participating in the study was asked to play a Nintendo DS daily for a specific period of time. This study is not the first in its group, it is simply a follow up to one done previously in Dundee. This study was done to determine if there was any changes or improvements in the statistics.

The study made use of two different groups of children. One group was required to play video games daily and the other group was forbidden from any video game play at all during the duration of the study. At the end of the experiment, all of the children were given the same test and some significant results were found. Those children who had played the video games not only scored much higher on the tests, but they also completed the tests much faster than those who had not. It should be noted that all of the children did show some degree of improvement, but the children who played video games advanced further indicating that such computer training may actually have some value.

As children's exposure to personal computers and computer training grows, they will find themselves fully prepared to take on the next generation of computer generated life. It is even possible that, among these children, one genius will emerge who can build the first truly self sufficient android.