[news]elementary School Students Imagine Their Ultimate Laptop

[SATORi]

Sure kids in developing countries need solar powered laptops, but kids in the states need hot buttons for Barbie.com and the pet store. As originally reported by CNET reporter Amy Tiemann, a group of seven- to nine-year-olds at a local Chapel Hill, NC elementary school have started a "mini-laptop club." Instead of playing on actual machines, the group mock-up their own notebooks using construction paper and markers, only to then spend hours "emailing" each other.

The Morning News followed up with Tiemann, publishing samples of the laptops and interviewing some of the "designers." In response to the many pop culture references on the imaginary keyboards Tiemann says,

I used to suspect that the idea of Tween Culture was an urban myth created by marketers, but now I believe that wherever it’s coming from, it is a real phenomenon. Eight years old appears to be a watershed year for many girls in which they begin to participate in pop culture and also crystallize their social structure. Knowing who your friends are, and either committing to a best friend or figuring out how to remain friends with everyone, are very important. That’s what fascinated me about their laptops. It was a way to demonstrate their knowledge of pop culture and social networks. Having your name on your friend’s keyboard is a little like being in someone’s “Top 8 friends” on MySpace. And yet these kids most likely don’t even know about MySpace yet...

...Kids are intensely social creatures and you can really see what is important to them by looking at their designs. I love all the keys dedicated to pets. Where my friends and I used to have imaginary horses, now these girls have imaginary pets with an online identity.

The inevitability of it all drew me to the paper laptops. Parents may want to delay their children’s computer use, but here they are drawing their own designs. It reminded me of taking away toy guns and seeing the kids make guns out of sticks instead.

What I find most interesting about these laptops is the obvious awareness these first, second, and third graders have of e-commerce. The above image (you'll need to click on it to make it bigger) has buttons for "buy," "order," "iphone," "itunes," "ringtone." Kids are much more perceptive than we ever give them credit for. But to remind ourselves that kids can say the darnedest things, the cutest line comes from eight-year-old Mandy after being told the interview would be published online, "I'm going to be popular! I should make a blog button, right now."