Cool! A Transformer is coming to our house?
By Alessio – alessiobernardelli.wordpress.com
You can imagine the excitement when I said to my three boys that a Transformer would arrive to our house in a week! The ASUS Transformer, which such a cool name, became immediately the most awesome thing they could imagine (even before having seen it).
I have to say that, as well as being a very engaging tool for them, it was also a life saver in the airport and on the plane on our way to and back from Italy during the Easter holidays. In fact, the boys had their first chance to use this amazing tablet in these environments, and that kept them happy, engaged and, most importantly, quiet… well, relatively.
You can see their first experience at using the Transformer in the video below. They loved it from the start, and, although slightly disappointed to discover that it couldn’t actually transform into a 6 m tall robot, they fought and argued quite animatedly over who would use it first!
There are some really interesting things to notice in this video. In the first part you see Luca (2) who is playing his favourite game, “Pieces” as he calls it. At first he tries to pick up the pieces of the puzzle with two fingers as if they were real bits of a jigsaw puzzle, but he quickly realizes that you need a single touch to move these (quite a change, uh!). The second user in this video is Matteo (6) who seems to find his way around applications immediately and being able to select the ones he likes, check them out and move on. In the glowing Typhoon game he doesn’t immediately understand what he needs to do and loses a point, but the second score is his. The last boy is Stefano (4) and he’s having a go at some pre-school writing and letter recognition.
All the apps you have seen in the video are free and everyday I find more and better ones. There are some apps to purchase for a price, but there are thousands free that are really useful and well designed. One thing I haven’t worked out yet is how to distinguish those designed to work on a smart phone (like the one on the video to trace the numbers) and those that are suitable to run on my tablet!
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