I can’t answer as to the durability… never tried breaking any of mine deliberately.
As for pressure sensitivity, you can just turn it off altogether in software and then enable it for whenever you think they’re ready for it.
For writing, a tablet can be a useful thing because it can guide a student through not only the correct shapes, but the correct order to make them in: the vertical line before the diagonal one for a R, for instance. Believe it or not, this is a very difficult thing for some kids to grok.
Leapfroghas a tablet that does this pretty well.
But I don’t think it can replace pencil and paper entirely. I know I have some difficulty writing with some tablets because I can’t get the pressure or speed to match what the computer wants to see. So I am confident that the reverse would be true: a child trained to write only on a tablet is going to face a steep learning curve when learning to write with the drag of graphite on smashed up trees.
WhyNot, thanks for the pointer about tracking order of strokes when learning to write. I now recall being told of similar features in some teaching gadgets in Japan where order of strokes is even more obviously important.
I agree with your point about the problem of switching from writing on tablet to writing on paper.
It may well be that the optimal approach would be to learn writing by writing on paper whereas further study would need to be made on optimal teaching of drawing. For drawing even if the kid only learns to draw on screen that still constitutes “having learned to draw” and he will not be expected to proficiently draw on paper in the same way as he is expected to write on paper in school.
Of course, I can’t hang the tablet from my refrigerator, where the kid can see it, be proud of it, and know that she gave something to Mama that’s cherished. 
At a certain age, kids love to give gifts, but of course their finances are limited. Many of them give their artwork to people they love, and it’s a good way to encourage generosity and empower the child. It’s a gift of themselves. Maybe I’m being sentimental, but I don’t value my child’s printed out computer creations as much as I do the ones where I can see the effort in the crinkles and eraser marks, the splash of milk in the corner, and the hand scrawled letters of her name in the corner, running off thr edge and curving down because she didn’t know how to space it, and doesn’t care that half the letters are upside down.
It’s those imperfections which, especially as they disappear with age, let me notice and appreciate not just her manual dexterity or color choices, but so many little things about her personality and development at the moment in time that piece was created. Those are the ones that get saved in the box in my closet. It’s my own personal family archeology exhibit.
That amount could be a huge deal for many school districts, which may only have a budget of a few thousand dollars per student, per year, for everything.
Wealthy school districts could likely make that happen. Less well-off ones would be very hard-pressed to do so.
nowhere in this thread have I ever said that it should be a “school” doing this. Let alone a public school. Or a poor public school. Or a poor public school in America, the land notorious for overpaid “public servants” (amongst them the “educators”) that never seem to fulfill their promises to their putative masters.
When drawing with pencil, pen and ink, markers, charcoal, pastels, etc. on paper, there are many differences in the way the media responds in contact with the drawing surface. Ther drawing surface is also variable. Drawing with a crow quill pen on smooth bristol board is far different from drawing with charcoal on a textured sheet.
A much as a human might be able to program software to approximate a similar visual effect on a tablet, it can never come close to being the same.
Art isn’t just creating an image. It is also about personal expression that flows from the mind and body.
Do you understand the difference between making an engineered trumpet sound come from a speaker and a real trumpet sound coming out of the end of a trumpet? Same thing.
Lastly. There should be appreciation for a unique original artifact that can be displayed on the wall or on the refrigerator. Imagine if Leonardo had drawn Mona Lisa on a tablet and had instantly sent the image all over the world. Cool. But no one could travel to the Louvre and see the one-and-only actual work of Leonardo’s hand.
So, then, you’re proposing that parents buy the tablets themselves? (Just to be clear.)
You’re talking about teaching children writing and drawing skills. While, certainly, some of this happens at home (particularly the drawing), most of the actual instruction, particularly on handwriting, happens at school. If these $2000 tablets are being purchased by individual families, you’ll have some who have them, and some who don’t. You’re now asking the teachers to teach these subjects differently, for the kids with tablets, and the kids without. A pain in the butt for the teachers, at a minimum.
VernWinterbottom, it’s true that different surfaces and tools are different. Which is why e.g. I only compare the tablet to “paper and pencil” and not various other media.
If you say that tablet is different from pencil in output, I might just well say “naah, it is your pencil that is different from my wonderful tablet”. What I am getting at here, we are not working under any external rule that children should learn to draw using X. That may apply for learning to write (they should learn to write on paper for their schoolwork) but not for drawing.
That being said, if learning to draw on tablet turns out to be really tough compared to pencil because of some aspects of the tablet that I (not an artist and never used a tablet) am not familiar with, then the issue would be moot. I.e. then tablet would be disqualified not because it’s different from what we are used to, but because it does not suit the main function we are studying - effectiveness of teaching children to draw.
kenobi 65, why are you so fixated on “teachers”? You can go open your own after-school / after-kindergarten center and teach children to your heart’s content, using gadgets bought by parents or bought by yourself and lent to students. Or you can introduce the technology into an “elite” kindergarten (either an existing one or you can open a new one and use the above-mentioned idea, and possibly various other exciting new ideas, to differentiate yourself from the competition). Or you can do many other things, none of which related to the OP. In general, many parents who are interested in investing in quality education for their kids are quite wealthy. Obviously, many other such parents may be poor, but then they would constitute a market niche for other goods and services and not for what we are discussing here.
The onus is generally on the one who wants to change the status quo to demonstrate why the proposed idea is better in some way. As, for example, the order of strokes in learning to write letters - it’s more efficient, cheaper by hour, and quicker, more responsive feedback to have a computer show the child, rather than an individual instructor. Those are advantages to the proposed tablet. Disadvantages, of course, are cost of the unit, durability and the difficulty transferring those skills to paper and pencil.
So what do you see as the advantages of teaching drawing on a tablet? I can think of one: they avoid the mess and cost of crayons, paint, colored pencils, etc. that need to be mixed, sharpened, stored and replaced as they’re used up. They can be used in the car without any risk of damaging the car’s interior. Disadvantages, like for writing, include expense and durability and difficulty transferring skills to traditional media.
The title question asks: “could children be taught to write and draw on writing tablet from the start?” Of course they could, and sometime in the future, they may well do it that way, when paper is obsolete. But right now it seems the disadvantages outweigh the advantages for use as an *exclusive *teaching method, while the advantages may outweigh the disadvantages for using them as one teaching tool of many…which is how they are actually currently used.
This… doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me, actually. To me, as a small child, everything worked by abstract magic. I put a crayon to paper and surprise! Stuff appears! Why? Because! Why for a crayon and not for a stick? Uh… well, because the crayon is magic and the stick isn’t? Later, you learn it’s because of friction with the paper blah blah blah, but certainly when I was a kid everything was abstract magic for a while.
My 15-month-old daughter recently learned to turn on a light switch so a light goes on! It’s magic! She certainly thinks it’s magic, and it is kind of magical even when you know about electricity, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to show her how to work light switches.
Though I do see your larger point about the tablet only being able to do a couple of things, whereas a crayon is more versatile (and I am limiting her exposure to electronic devices until she is much older for precisely that reason), but that isn’t a function of worldview.
ETA: I forgot the thing I actually came into the thread to say, which is that I suspect it would be easier to form letters by an index finger on a tablet than by holding a pencil properly, so perhaps it would be a first step to forming letters. I think you might run the risk of a child who only knew how to use her index finger and never figured out how to write properly, though.
Because that’s who teaches children how to write?
Both of which would still be “teaching”, led by “teachers”. They may not be public-school teachers (of whom you seem to have a low opinion, but that’s another topic), but any parent who’s willing to spend the money on a private, “elite” kindergarten, or on a private after-school education program, is going to a absolutely want to make certain that the people who are doing the teaching are trained as teachers.
Nah. As long as you teach the child to write with her hand as well, then you’re fine. Dexterity is learned in 99 other ways besides gripping a pencil and trying to sketch out your name.
I would totally support tech that used a tablet in writing instruction, especially if there was software in which a child was limited to only certain sections, so that kids aren’t ‘writing all over the lines’, or there was some kind of sensory feedback capability (like how you can set your cell phone to give feedback when you hit a letter on a touch screen).
Reading and writing go hand in hand for an L1 language such as English. They’d be fine.
also, leap pads suck nowadays.
My son goes to an uppity private kindergarten and I’d say I teach him about 80 per cent of the writing part.
I never even thought of the mess aspect (I ought to get out more, LOL). But I can name a few WAGs:
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more forgiving and powerful user interface makes the process easier and more enjoyable. People, including small kids, want to do a good job and don’t want to do poor one. If they can correct their errors easily and produce more attractive pictures faster with less effort (on erasing, throwing out the paper, crying etc) they will be overall more productive and learn more.
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you can use automated tools to give them simple advice based on heuristics when the instructor is too busy. This is kind of like what CitizenPained is proposing for some aspect of teaching writing. But maybe for teaching drawing we could gradually invent hundreds of heuristics for an instructor-assisting, drawing-teaching AI. Whereas as long as we are stuck to paper and pencil, it’s down to who the instructor is looking at at any given time.
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if we have not yet invented those automated heuristics, we can also just use humans with a simple checklist over the internet for the same purpose. Even the dumbest humans are pretty good at making simple evaluations of pictures, sketches and small fragments of the same. From the kid’s standpoint, of course, there is no difference whether the canned messages being broadcast at him are based on evaluation of an AI or of a human.
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data representing how different children draw different things after different number of hours of training can be aggregated in data corpora for further research on the topic for years and decades to come. A welcome change to the sort of “research based” “best practices in teaching” that we are so used to seeing nowadays.
LOL, talk about market failure. I have seen similar anecdotal claims online elsewhere as well. Just goes to show us that “invisible hand of the market” will not move the neolithic natives to the Iron Age or American educators to an age of sanity and efficiency. Getting the government off people’s throats is a necessary step, but not a sufficient one - it sure isn’t the government that is keeping those instructors at CitizenPained’s kindergarten from doing a good job, all the while sincerely believing that nothing better is possible or even desirable.
Just remember that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. 