The darndest thing

So, a nice side benefit of having purchased typing software for our older daughter is that our younger daughter is learning to type too. (She uses the Disney title, which by age 9 our older daughter wouldn’t be caught dead playing.)

There was a wonderful moment when she our youngest first started playing and was learning the first four keys on the home row: j f k d.

Rafiki the Baboon (yes, it is a Disney game) was leading her through a typing exercise: fff jjj ddd kkk… and on and on it went.

My daughter started saying each letter as she typed:

“f” f “f” f “f” “f” f and so on.

She kept that up for three lines of type. Then she just started typing without saying anything for another line.

When it happened, I thought: “Ah! She started out saying each letter to help herself know what to do; then once she learned the task, she didn’t need to tell herself what to do anymore.”

This is, of course, the phenomenon of internalization which was first described by Lev Vygotsky, and which I wrote about in How Computer Games Help Children Learn as one of the of the fundamental ways kids learn through games.

At that moment, though, the scientist in me replied: “But how do you know she’s stopped saying the letters because she has mastered them?”

And then at the start of the next line of letter may daughter said really more to herself and to the computer than to me: “Oh, enough already! Can’t I do something more challenging!” Then she happily went on typing when she realized that the row had more complicated combinations of letters to type.

Kids really do say the darndest things…