Discourage "smashing"
Make it only respond if a single key is pressed and not when banging the whole hand on the keyboard.
anonymous
shared this idea
Good idea, I’ll see if it’s possible to detect multiple keypresses at the same time. What do you want it to do? BUZZ? Big “No!” or Red X?
8 comments
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Serena
commented
I agree with Bob. If it's going to happen, make it an option...
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Bob
commented
I disagree. My son loved (and sometimes loves) to just smash away. It's Baby SMASH after all. However, he discovered in time (and with me and my wife showing him) that by pressing a single key, he can get the same result again and again. This thrilled him, and so he began to experiment. Now he generally carefully presses certain keys and calls out the letter. But sometimes he likes to just smash for the fun of it.
I can't help but wonder that if it would have recognized only the first key if he might not have gotten the impression that smashing all those keys made a "k" for example. Regardless, it's all a fairly minor thing. It's not meant to be the end all and be all of alphabet tutors nor a test of a kid's abilities. It's a fun thing they can do with a computer that won't harm the computer and lets them slowly understand the connection between what they're doing and how the computer responds.
If you do make this change, maybe make it an option?
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Carrie Medine commented
You could have it say "OUCH to rough or something like that"
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Nathan Johnstone commented
a simple way to do this is have a parameter in the options where you can set the millisecond delay between allowed key detections. I think pgauthier has the best proposal that would fulfil the request
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chaiguy1337
commented
Maybe have a penalty period where if the keys are smashed (however you decide to detect this), a sad face or something shows up, and the keys are locked, until the child stops smashing the keys, and the face turns happy and the user (whoops, child) can press keys again. That would not only discourage smashing, but they would actually learn not to do it (not the case for just ignoring smashed keys)
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hometoast
commented
To add to pgauthier's idea, you could ignore any keys pressed within X ms and *adjacent* to the last key. For instance "ERTDGCVB" are all adjacent to F. That might better define smashing. This would allow for, say a baby to whack alternate keys on either side of the board.
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pgauthier
commented
Would a very small delay in the acceptance of key presses help the problem? I suspect that if 5 keys are "smashed" they are really being accepted fractions of a second apart in most cases. It might minimize the impact of "smashing" to throw out any keystrokes that are received in the next X ms after a key is pressed. This could be customizable by age. Just thinking aloud...
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Brian Edomm
commented
It shouldn't do anything. Any kind of feedback the baby gets will encourage the behaviour more. Depending on age... the baby doesn't care what happens when you press the keys, just that SOMETHING happens. For the older kids, who might benefit some kind of warning, I think a sound would be best. Perhaps something not as harsh as a buzz/ding, but obviously a "sad" sound.
