I made an online game for my 8 month old baby to play. If you are a baby you might like it too! :

>>> Keyboard Letters Game <<<

Maybe I should come up with a more imaginative name for it, but the idea is, he can bash the keyboard and big colourful letters pop up on screen. It also reads out the letters (put your sound on). Here is a video of him in action:

[Update: source code is on github]

Our little boy is 8 months old now. For quite a while he’s been interested in my laptop. He’s interested in any new objects, but I think he’s also seen me typing away on it, and wants a bit of that action. He impatiently tries to reach for my laptop whenever he’s nearby.

I realised he’s a bit young for this still. As you can see in the video, he’s whacking the keyboard quite violently with his whole hand. In fact we have a toy with a just one big button, and he’s still developing the coordination needed to press that, so he definitely doesn’t get the idea of pressing individual keys on the keyboard, but he does seem to be making the link that keyboard whacking makes sound and colourful things happen. Unfortunately he’s also very good at somehow finding weird and wonderful keyboard shortcuts I never knew existed, for dropping out of fullscreen mode, and opening settings etc.

For his age, I’m getting some ideas for simpler games I could develop which just bring light colour and sound based on approximate location on the keyboard he’s whacked.

When he’s a bit older I imagine this might help him understand typing and also letters of the alphabet, particularly as it reads out the letters. Mind you, I’m told they don’t teach the reading of the alphabet in the same way any more in UK schools :-O   Do I need to make a “synthetic phonics” version of this?

I actually made this game for the first time when I was helping out with IT in a junior school. I must have been about 15/16 years old at the time, and I made all kinds of experimental things in BASIC running on Acorn computers (odd things we had in schools at the time). So this is a reimplementation of 20 year old idea!

It’s nice that we can do this kind of thing on the web these days, although doing this with javascript is probably quite a messy bodge-job with nasty browser compatibility considerations compared to doing it in Acorn BASIC. It makes me wonder how I would get on as a 15 year old learning to program in modern times. I don’t remember exactly how I did speech synthesis 20 years ago (system call-out to do a *SAY "HELLO" command perhaps). On the web I didn’t actually know this was possible. On a whim I googled “speech synthesis HTML5” thinking “Nah surely it’s not…” but it is! Speech synthesis is available for calling in javascript on modern browsers! Might have to have some more fun with this!

…if my baby doesn’t destroy my laptop first