262 votes
Discourage "smashing"
Make it only respond if a single key is pressed and not when banging the whole hand on the keyboard.
Status:
planned
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?
Nathan Johnstone
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
chaiguy1337
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)
hometoast
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.
pgauthier
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...
Brian Edomm
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.