Generation App - The Mobile Teacher

While educational toys have been popular for years, this current generation's innate lust for information is unmatched, breeding technologic advances that have brought with them the availability of constant learning. Smartphone applications allow our children to play and learn, no matter where they are.

Grandparents or even parents often find themselves asking for help with computers or other technology by their much younger children and grandchildren. Why? Because it is simply a part of the world they are born into, giving them a natural understanding of how these systems integrate with their lives.

Apps encourage this internal desire for learning, teaching everything from fine motor skills for toddlers to complex mathematical complexes, through what, to the child, is nothing more than a game.

While developers have taken some of their cues from toys that have been around fo r years, like interactive an Hot Wheels app or using classic characters like Gumby or Bugs Bunny, there is a level of mental stimulation and integration of knowledge and creativity that are expected in today’s standard applications.

Many apps are specially designed to develop hand-eye coordination and dexterity for toddlers, helping them reach important milestones in their development. Tracing lines and shapes, as well as learning numbers and letters can easily be translated into a fun, exciting pastime with age-appropriate drawing apps.

For older children, there are countless games where complicated concepts like fractions or long division come to live, and practice becomes fun with simple digital rewards and games. Science and history becomes personalized as children can follow the visual, realistic implications of everything from science experiments or a click-able table of elements, to interactive historical stories.

No matter what age the child, today’s advanced society has made it clear, digital entertainment, with its flexible, dynamic usage, is the ideal for both the present and the future. With the majority of games being stored in one simple device, the value and diversity that is available at any given time is astronomical, making the choice of the apps themselves another avenue of self-expression and personal development. Games often offer settings and options that can be altered with a child’s mood, or changed as they grow and improve. Each new app offers additional opportunities for independent choices to be made, including which apps to download, which characters to engage with and how they chose to engage in the game itself.

Children hold these games in the palm of their hand, and love the autonomy of using self-lead programs to both play and learn. No matter what generation a child is born into, they always long for whatever their parents and older siblings have access. Smartphones being at the hands of most adults and older children, is just another catalyst for these developing minds to be reaching for apps to keep them engaged and developing.

Imagine a child 20 years ago begging for access to encyclopedias or lessons on colors and numbers. Things that were once looked at as work, are now associated with play, as the App Generation demands that their minds be challenged as their fingers tap, scroll and click.

• Author Bio:
  
  

  Mother to five and grandmother to ten, Bonnie Wood rum is an experienced blogger specializing in the area of family-focused products and services. Bonnie blogs regularly for a number of children’s entertainment and mom-targeted/kid-centric brands such as Purex,Safety 1st, PBSKids, American Greetings Properties (owners of Care Bears & Strawberry Shortcake), Outfit7Limited (producers of TalkingTom and Friends and TalkingAngela) and Bandai America (makers of Power Rangers action figures, Tamagotchi and more).