"Bib up and boot up" may soon be the battle cry of technophile parents, with the release of BabyWow! from BowWow House of San Jose, California. The US$39.95 product aims to give children as young as nine months a head start in their neural wiring.
BabyWow! joins JumpStart Baby and JumpStart Toddlers by Knowledge Adventure of Torrance, California, in the burgeoning category of "lapware," as overworked parents facing stiff pressure in their own lives feel the need to give their kids a competitive edge while still in the stroller.
"Nine months to three years is the only age that matters in terms of real brain development," said BowWow House founder and CEO Tony Fernandes. "BabyWow! takes the computer and turns it into a stimulation machine for really young kids."
The product is based partly on research by a couple of PhDs from the University of Kansas which concludes that a correlation exists between the number and variety of words an infant hears and its IQ. BabyWow! also takes a cue from William Staso, the author of Brain Under Construction, who advocates the benefits of visual stimulation on the developing brain.
The app is divided into five sections: vocabulary, containing 2,000 words in eight languages; peekaboo; guessing games; photo albums with collections of themed photographs; and lessons on concepts such as far/near, in front/behind, and in/out, as well as numbers one through 10.
The design concept was to turn the computer into an interesting piece of furniture, on which the child can play and elicit sounds and images. The parent decides which path to take; after that, any keystroke or mouse click becomes in effect a "next" button.
Fernandes, former senior manager of user experience at Netscape Communications who led the Communicator interface development team, said he tried to design BabyWow! to be interesting for adults. To accomplish this, he used photographs with creative details instead of cartoons, and inserted opportunities for parents to brush up on their French as they play with their kids.
While child-development specialists may be leery of a technological replacement for human teaching, Fernandes insists that BabyWow! is not intended to replace interactions with parents. The point, he maintains, is simply to allow those interactions to be more focused and productive.
"There may be a need here for a little caution before we jump on this as the answer," said Stevanne Auerbach, a San Francisco expert in children's products, child development, and special education. Auerbach, who reviews playthings as Dr. Toy, pointed out that a baby's eyesight is quite different from that of a grown-up, and that stimulation that seems interesting to an adult may be all wrong for a child.
Roger Schank, director of the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, isn't convinced that lapware is the answer. "I'm not worried about baby education," he said. "What makes uneducated babies is no one paying attention to them."
Neither Schank nor Auerbach has examined BabyWow! or the Knowledge Adventure products.
Jennifer Johnson, public relations manager for Knowledge Adventure, explained that these applications are not an attempt to drag kids to the keyboard, but rather an acknowledgment of the impossibility of keeping them from it. "Computers today are part of the household," she said. "When parents are working on the computer, it's the child's natural reaction to climb aboard and push a button and see what happens. Kids want to play with the computer -- they're naturally attracted."
There's no question that their parents have been attracted. According to PC Data, JumpStart Toddlers racked up sales of $5.16 million in 1997.
