Pou

The other day I was watching my daughter, who is 6, playing pou (pronounced Poe, the same as in Edgar Allen) which is not just a game, it is the name of a character which you can use to play lots of games, and it’s also sort of a phone version of a pet rock, you can feed it and take care of it and even customize it to a certain extent, and it’s what all the kids (at least kids of her age and a little older because I know a lot of my 4th graders play it, too) are playing now.

Anyway, she was playing a game where the food falls from the sky and he opens his mouth to catch it and it’s basically space invaders.  You can take any game, change the details, give it a different name and you’re in business.  Then she played a game where you had to extend lines of various colors to fill up all the space on the screen and it’s educational, I suppose, as long as teaching kids how to click and drag is an educational priority.

A couple of observations:

She is way better at it than me, part of which is mental reaction speed and part of which is manual dexterity.  I am not using my age as an excuse, not entirely.  She is probably faster even than I would have been at her age, and she is not nearly as obsessed with electronic games as her older brother (who is 10).

Kids today are different.  I have tried to turn my kids into readers, without a tremendous amount of success.  (They  are as good as most other kids their age but, really, that’s a pretty low standard.) But,  they are totally adept at some things I don’t understand, like this game.

Computers are changing the way people think.  Whereas people who grew up reading books read left to right, unless they speak one of the semitic languages, in which case it’s right to left, but that’s a minor difference, like which side of the road you drive on, the point is, it’s sequential, linear, whereas younger kids are much more adept at glancing at a page and picking out the key words.

I haven’t done any research on this, have no facts to back it up, but that’s my hypothesis and I’m throwing it out there.