Children Struggle To Hold Pencils Due To Too Much Tech, Doctors Say (theguardian.com) 314
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior pediatric doctors have warned. An overuse of touchscreen phones and tablets is preventing children's finger muscles from developing sufficiently to enable them to hold a pencil correctly, they say. "Children are not coming into school with the hand strength and dexterity they had 10 years ago," said Sally Payne, the head pediatric occupational therapist at the Heart of England foundation NHS Trust. "Children coming into school are being given a pencil but are increasingly not be able to hold it because they don't have the fundamental movement skills. "To be able to grip a pencil and move it, you need strong control of the fine muscles in your fingers,. Children need lots of opportunity to develop those skills." Payne said the nature of play had changed. "It's easier to give a child an iPad than encouraging them to do muscle-building play such as building blocks, cutting and sticking, or pulling toys and ropes. Because of this, they're not developing the underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil."
wish (Score:3)
Yeah this was a problem 4000 years ago, too (Score:5, Funny)
As the newfangled quill became more popular, we began to see more and more children lack the hand strength to use a hammer and chisel. Sadly, we have yet to recover from such a blow to society. Once again technology has degraded our quality of life.
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To too many people, technology is simply something they do not understand. They are afraid of it, afraid that it will make them obsolete, and desperate to show how bad it is.
With me, I have never been able to use a pencil, and I did not touch "technology" until middle school.
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As the newfangled quill became more popular, we began to see more and more children lack the hand strength to use a hammer and chisel. Sadly, we have yet to recover from such a blow to society. Once again technology has degraded our quality of life.
Kids today still don't know how to use a fucking hammer, which is ironically STILL a very useful tool 4,000 years later. That has nothing to do with the adaption of the quill, and has everything to do with the real issue, which is sheltering the living shit out of children and letting them grow up in a fucking fantasyland that doesn't even come close to resembling real life.
It's pretty sad to think that an EMP bomb would be just as deadly as any nuclear bomb to this generation.
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Technology isn't really to blame for lack of hammer skills. it is the rise of the economy, bartering and capitalism. this led to job specialization, a Baker spends all his time baking, a hammer isn't much use to him in his job. if he needs a new shelf built he bakes some bread then barters it or sells it and hires a carpenter, that is skilled in using a hammer and would do a much better job than the baker could. meanwhile the carpenter might be able to build a kitchen, but that doesn't mean he is able to bake.
Basic baking or carpentry skills are not exactly reserved for licensed specialists. Both hold value in normal everyday life, and can save you a lot of money.
I know that the default excuse to growing up in life and having essentially no knowledge is "teh interwebs", but there is some value in not having to call up Mommy or download a 7-step instructables guide in order to learn how to boil water. I guess the concept of being self-sufficient is rapidly becoming extinct.
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As someone with arthritis that makes his handwriting bad and painful to do, I can confirm that it's not much of a hindrance these days. The only major issue is reproducing my signature.
Of more interest would be the effect of touch screen use on children's ability to type.
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Thank you. Saved me from saying much the same thing.
It should also be noted that kids today can't handle a carriage pulled by even a single horse, much less a proper team. And most of them couldn't harvest wheat with a sickle to save their lives....
Wait until they hit puberty (Score:5, Funny)
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Hopefully in the correct hand, you never know...
In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Pencils are going the way of the Dodo. Not saying that is good (I don't actually think it is, there are a lot of other instruments that are basically similar to hold like a pencil), but that seems to be what is happening.
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Pencils are going the way of the Dodo. Not saying that is good (I don't actually think it is, there are a lot of other instruments that are basically similar to hold like a pencil), but that seems to be what is happening.
I still know of many people who attend daily meetings with pen (or pencil) and paper, because trying to converse with someone face to face in a meeting is kind of difficult when everyone has a laptop propped up in front of their face, which also makes me wonder if the person is actually taking notes or fucking off surfing the web during a meeting.
And ironically enough, it now may be more secure to write a letter to someone than to send them any form of electronic transmission these days.
We'll get rid of pen
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Well, I do that too. Sure, it is not a "pencil", but one black and one red high-quality ink-roller, but it works on the same principle. I find that making notes on paper not only works much better in a meeting, I do remember more of the meeting and have better prioritization, even if I never look at the notes again. And you can make drawings and diagrams much more easily and precisely.
So I fully agree with you. I do not think the paperless office is going to happen though. (Not sure about IPv6 on mass-scale
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If I didn't use a drawing tablet every other day I think I might use a pen/pencil maybe four times a year??
When you use a stylus of any kind a lot you build up your hand as well as just learn to write and draw some things almost as a reflex. When diagramming on whiteboards or making scratch notes coworkers almost always comment on how neat and orderly it is - but like I say most people don't wrap their hands around any kind of writing utensil for months so I chalk it up to experience.
I guess they've phased
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I say "cursive" is sadistic torture and has no actual use today unless you are an art student. I dropped it in the first week of university, because it just did not work for note-taking at all and was damaging my hand at the speeds required and I have never looked back. Same for the today horribly broken idea of a fountain-pen. I just regret that I did not ritually destroy this torture implement, but fortunately we were allowed to use modern tools (ink-roller for me) several years before finishing school. H
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I mean cursive. And being a bit more advanced on my way, correcting student exams (regarding readability) is worst when they are using cursive.
haptics (Score:5, Interesting)
It might be just because I'm a very kinaesthetic person, but this is something I find in general computer tech has failed to grasp: How important it is to hold something, to touch something, to feel something touching you.
Among other things, this is the primary reason most keyboards on the market suck, and why VR still hasn't taken off. We techies tend to believe too much that 80% of the human perception is visual, and that is just plain out wrong. The largest sensory organ in your body is your skin.
Computers make great toys for kids, they allow so much creativity and agency, and there are so many skills you can develop with them. But kids should also play with sticks, with Legos, with tools, with wood and metal and stone.
And, frankly speaking, if you don't give your child real, physical books to read, IMHO you should be locked up for child abuse.
Re:haptics (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you noticed the resurgent interest in mechanical keyboards recently? I see this (at least partly) as a reaction against the aesthetic that Steve Jobs pushed so hard, and which so many companies then copied. Jobs never saw a device (including a keyboard) that was thin enough or flat enough to please him. It's not natural, though, for human beings to poke at flat surfaces. We're adapted to manipulating objects in three dimensions.
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Have you noticed the resurgent interest in mechanical keyboards recently? I see this (at least partly) as a reaction against the aesthetic that Steve Jobs pushed so hard, and which so many companies then copied. Jobs never saw a device (including a keyboard) that was thin enough or flat enough to please him. It's not natural, though, for human beings to poke at flat surfaces. We're adapted to manipulating objects in three dimensions.
That's a bit hyperbolic - thin keyboards are thin, but certainly not flat. And while YMMV, I personally find them easier and faster to use, due to the very short key travel distance. My fingers can fly over the keys, barely grazing them, hardly needing to push at all to type; on a "regular" keyboard, I have to lift my fingers pretty high after pressing each key to clear the surrounding ones.
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You make some good points, but then you throw in this rape-cage culture bit:
And, frankly speaking, if you don't give your child real, physical books to read, IMHO you should be locked up for child abuse.
which needs to be called out. If you meant it literally, which I'm not assuming, then that's a separate issue.
What? (Score:2)
They're fine. (Score:3)
They'll be fine. Whenever I had to write cursive, it grated by wrist bones after a while. Like most physical adjustments for a task, you do a little damage, your body heals, and over a couple of weeks you're a halfway-capable writing machine.
Writing isn't going away even in some far flung future - but it's understandable why kids don't want to use it constantly anymore compared with alternatives.
That particular kind of bone pain involved with mashing those wrist bones into shapes is validly a
thing that makes you not want to practice writing.
But kids would still end up doing it, even if there aren't lesson plans. If there stuck somewhere and want to make a crude sign, they're not going to be unable to. They'll still write words in the sand with s a stick, and countless other interactions with language we're drawn to.
The kids will be fine. It's the adults we should really be worried about - there's some things really wrong with them.
Ryan Fenton
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I was a precocious child who was always done with my work first, and correctly too. A teacher in third grade who was a shit teacher (and who was only a teacher at my school for about two years) didn't like the way I disrupted the class by looking at the other children, true story. I was supposed to put my head down on my desk, another true story, and wait quietly for the other children to finish. So he started assigning me lines to write. Hundreds of them. Ever since, it causes me physical pain to write in
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until the day they want to get into electronics and realize they can't hold a soldering iron.
oh well. who needs electronics. we'll have robots that will do that for us
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They'll be fine. Whenever I had to write cursive, it grated by wrist bones after a while.
And now look at you, you type just bine!!
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Writing isn't going away even in some far flung future - but it's understandable why kids don't want to use it constantly anymore compared with alternatives.
That particular kind of bone pain involved with mashing those wrist bones into shapes is validly a
thing that makes you not want to practice writing.
If it hurts to write, you are actually doing it incorrectly. I only learned the proper technique as an adult for calligraphy, after I got frustrated with having had poor handwriting for my entire life. Here are some tips:
1. Your back should be upright and straight.
2. Your table should be adjusted to be just below your hand when your elbow is at a 90 degree angle and ideally, slightly sloped upward.
3. Your wrist, forearm, and finger joints should not actually move at all (or as little as possible) when wri
This has to be the dumbest thing I've ever read (Score:2)
Has it not occurred to anyone that you don't even start writing until you're five or six? Everyone has this same weakness in their hands at this time in life. It has nothing to do with technology, unless tablets and smartphones can travel through time and occupy our hands when we were kids.
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We actually did writing exercises from 3 on in kindergarden, but except for e's and l's and kinds of a's and o's it wheren really letters.
On the other hand I really wonder what the guys publishing this expect? If kids don't draw/paint with pencils anymore, obvioulsy they have lower skills when entering school. I guess they just overemphasize the problem, if there is any, instead of simply adjusting the way how they teach.
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This is the first I've heard of kindergarten having prerequisites. They certainly weren't published anywhere.
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Do kids seriously not draw pictures for their parents to put up under a fridge magnet anymore?
Pass me the (Score:2)
Children Struggle To Hold Pencils Due To Too Much (Score:2)
Reminds me of a conversation with my doctor - where he dreams he is assigned to a nursing home as a physical rehab clinician. The primary rehab issue is getting the old people help and retraining to overcome the crippling arthritis of their thumbs resulting from a lifetime of thumb button pushing and swiping on their mobile phones . . .
Easy solution to develop fine motor skills (Score:3)
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OMG, why? A computer can simulate any physical instrument, and then some more. Why go to the pains of *manually* producing sound?
You can actually do both. For example, using Garage Band on an iPad you can plug a MIDI keyboard into it with the right adapter. It's remarkably easier to play a keyed instrument, for example, using actual weighted keys as opposed to a touch screen. You can do it with a touch screen but it's a lot harder and it doesn't have a way to send how hard you play the keys for natural volume purposes. For electronica, techno, trance, etc. yeah I'd say inline with the Roland 808/909, it would make more sense to d
Alternate headline: (Score:4, Interesting)
"Children adapt to best adjust to what they need to do."
Handwriting is dead. The writing is on the wall. (Sorry!)
These kids have 4 years of touchscreen and keyboard skills before they go to school now and we're teaching them to use pencils? Why? A lot of schools are issuing tablets to individual pupils from a young age and most certainly they still teach ICT skills.
We had to be taught how to write because it's not natural and "you'll need to be able to write when you grow up."
They need to be taught how to use a keyboard / touchscreen because it's not natural and "you'll need to be able to type when you grow up"
For myself, I literally have had NO NEED of handwriting beyond block capitals for the entirety of my adult life. Sure, I can do it. But I don't need it. And I have a degree and still didn't need it. In fact, I would argue that my degree is in one of the few areas where touchscreens and computers are useless for transcribing information - mathematics. I can out-formula anyone using LaTeX or equivalent by hand. But that's because I was made to use my hand, rather than a computer language with a GUI for laying out maths equations.
Rather than force these kids to hurt themselves (building up muscles like that is done by tearing and healing, tearing and healing enough that they strengthen the right areas - do you not remember wrist-pain when writing in school, because I do, yet I've never suffered from RSI even a tiny bit), to learn an outdated, obsolete and (to them) secondary skill, let them use the skills they ALREADY HAVE by the time they hit school, on a lot more relevant technology, which is much closer to what they'll require when they are older.
Fact is, I work in prep schools* - these kids are literally entering school able to type on QWERTY and do every swipe, sweep, drag, drop, tap and hold they will need until at least adulthood. And then we sit them in the ICT suite and try to teach them "home keys" (an outdated concept once you are able to type at any speed at all, like telling a rally driver to keep his hands on the ten-to-two position). And then we sit them in the English classes and force them to write with a stick for YEARS on end until they've learned to break their hands enough to hold the stick just right so that they don't have illegible scrawl but proper joined-up writing that they will NEVER NEED TO READ in their life (how much of what you read is printed or screen typefaces only? Almost everything).
No matter how much you disagree with abolishing handwriting, it's a stupid suggestion to forcibly train kids on an alternative older technology when they are so accustomed to the current technology that it comes natural to them anyway.
*Private education, age 3-13. The headmaster's 3-year-old son smashed their laptop screen because he assumed it was touchscreen like EVERYTHING ELSE he's used in his life and so kept applying pressure when it didn't respond to touch. I'm not even joking. And if the live-in son of the live-in headmaster of an exclusive expensive prep school (who still do "pen licences" for handwriting, etc. and teach Latin) is already that familiar with touchscreens, you can be sure that most people have that skill.
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Then it would seem that shoe-tying would be a better replacement lesson. Hell, a general knot-tying course would probably be better for kids than pencil-use.
I've had way more times in my adult life where I just needed something to stay tight/still than when I've needed cursive.
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I've strangely had a resurgence of cursive use lately thanks to taking notes on a tablet with a stylus. It's noisy and irritating in a tactile way to lift and touch down between words or letters so I've gradually switched back to long hand cursive. Others with tablets I've asked have also noticed the tendency and shared an initial period of googling how to make capital Q and Z for example. My writing is now getting better than it was in childhood when I used it more often.
As a funny aside we're noticing ma
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Hand writing is still useful for making quick notes. We are in an awkward time period where tablets aren't cheap enough and batteries don't last long enough for them to be adequate paper replacements, but at the same time we want everything to be digital and searchable. There are bridging technologies like Evernote and Google Keep that can OCR your scrawlings, but I'm really looking forward to having a pile of tablets and a stylus on my desk.
Yes, a stylus. As well as being able to sketch, on-screen swipe ke
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These kids have 4 years of touchscreen and keyboard skills before they go to school now and we're teaching them to use pencils?
Because otherwise they never really know how a character is written. They have no piccture in mind where to start and how to draw the lines.
Btw: why should handwriting be dead? It was once considered an art. And sooner or later everyone will have to sign something. Better he is able to write his own name somewhat properly, or not?
Fine motor control is used in many things. (Score:2)
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I say the same thing about all those kids who wasted their childhood reading books.
This is why anime artists are in Japan (Score:2)
My understanding is they have been hard core into training "penmanship" due to Japanese Kanji characters and such. It is not a surprise to me that a ton of people in Japan are good at drawing. This study makes me think the opposite is going to happen in America or wherever kids are using iPads to both learn and waste time instead of using a pencil or crayons.
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Is there anybody left who doesn't know what hentai is?
F*ck them. Hard. Handwriting was torture for me. (Score:2)
And I figure it was the same for many others who like to type. This goes to show how we have something of a regime of handwriting nazis going on. My mother made me copywrite books to improve my handwriting. Still hate her for that. It was torture.
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I collect fountain pens and build my own keyboards (you insensitive clod!). I don't see any reason why somebody wouldn't want to be skilled at both handwriting and typing. It does seem like both are on the decline, though.
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Still hate her for that.
You need to get over that. She was trying to give you a good life.
Much ado about nothing (Score:2)
A skill that was once necessary for learning and communication no longer is.
Electronic media has replaced pen and paper, so the skill to hold a pen isn't particular useful,
except perhaps as an input device to aid in artistic creativity.... I don't see graphics artists turning in their stylus and drawing tablets for a touchscreen,
but other than that.... Pens are soon to be extinct
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they will still need to sign legal documents and even use a stylus for the electronic credit card reader.
Legal paper documents can be signed by a stamp, a thumbprint, or a crudely drawn figure with no need for handwriting.
BUT Legal paper documents are going away --- by the time today's kids are 18, to sign a document: you'll probably swipe your driver's license and just scan a finger to create your unique digital imprint.
All the electronic-sign credit card readers i've encountered let you si
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Open Kindle, write note, duct-tape Kindle to the fridge.
BS (Score:2)
Whats the difference between hplding a stylis and holdind a pencil
Re:BS (Score:5, Funny)
The kinds of typos it generates, apparently.
Does it really work that way? (Score:2)
dont let preschoolers have gadets (Score:2)
Or a Guitar Pick. (Score:2)
Learning to play the Guitar is hard, can't a computer fake it for me!
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Learning to play the Guitar is hard
Luckily you don't need to play any instrument to be a YouTube rock star. Everyone wants to be famous, they don't actually want to learn to play music.
can't a computer fake it for me!
Definitely.
something sinister (Score:2)
It seems to me that there are plenty of fine motor skills involved in using tech, maybe we should adapt handwriting technique to embrace those skills. It's not like controlling a pencil has just one aspect to it.
For all I know the conventional pencil grasp between the thumb and first two fingertips is degraded but the ability to control the pencil when it is sandwiched between the first two fingers is improved.
Or what about non-dominant hand writing, maybe tech has improved the spread of motor skills betw
Invention (Score:2)
Mouse-shaped pencil holder. User cups holder in hand and manipulates it much like a computer mouse. Buttons to raise lower an assortment of pen/pencil tips.
So wait... (Score:2)
...you're suggesting that just tossing your kid on the couch with an iPad is NOT a successful parenting strategy?
Next you're going to tell me they're going to end up antisocial web-leeches that don't know how to actually interact with other humans.
On the bright side, though, if there's ever an evolutionary advantage to the skills for playing Kandy Krush they're fucking SET.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Using a game controller is completely different from using a touchscreen smart phone/tablet. That's what kids do today. The only thing they use their hands for are swiping from one YouTube video to the next.
Decades from now YouTube will be blamed for all of this. I mean hell, they're shifting their whole damn business model to cater to kids and push everyone else off. Gotta get that money and kids are easily addicted targets.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
At 40, like me, you would have learned to use a pencil first. We had Atari, we had Nintendo, we had C64, but they weren't quite as prevalent as smart-phones and iPads, which are what my kids grow up on.
My kids have definitely had issue with pencils and scissors in their early years. Of course, they got over it. These tests are designed to identify developmental disorders, and one failing one test in a series does not a developmental disorder make.
But, not shown are that kids are learning their letters and learning to read at a younger age. While my kids struggled a bit with using pencils, they both went in to pre-school, at 3 years of age knowing their alphabet and knowing how to read. My son in particular went in to kindergarten reading at a 7th grade level, he learned all of it from his iPad and learning to read to play games that he saw me playing.
So while kindergarten teachers may need to spend more time with pencils and scissors and developing hand strength, they will not need to spend as much time teaching the alphabet and reading, both of which are pretty much 90% of the kindergarten curriculum.
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The other 10% being "do not eat glue".
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I would say, having experience in the matter, "bathroom activities".
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At 40, like me, you would have learned to use a pencil first. We had Atari, we had Nintendo, we had C64, but they weren't quite as prevalent as smart-phones and iPads, which are what my kids grow up on.
My kids have definitely had issue with pencils and scissors in their early years. Of course, they got over it. These tests are designed to identify developmental disorders, and one failing one test in a series does not a developmental disorder make.
We also played with legos and erector sets.
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Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
This story seems like complete, made-up bullshit. It has:
- Doctors and scientists making a claim that seems ridiculous on it's face
- Focuses on children and learning for reader and interest
- A bogeyman
- No actual scientific study mentioned
- An audience ready to believe
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This story seems like complete, made-up bullshit. It has:
- Doctors and scientists making a claim that seems ridiculous on it's face
The part that's bullshit is: Children have less fine motor skills to grip a pencil compared to another time in history because ________. It must be, screen time! There is absolutely no logical connection between the problem and the cause.
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COUNTLESS studies to IMPROVE DRAMATICALLY after a good amount of video game playing.
Indeed they have. All of these countless studies involved games that actually had hand eye co-ordination and fine motor skills, i.e. using a mouse / keyboard or a game controller.
Have you seen a child play on an iPad? They just smack the screen with their hand and get rewarded, that is assuming they are playing games at all. There is a big difference between playing with an iPad and working your way through an FPS game on an Xbox.
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You can still put most of us 40+ against teens and we'll still win - if the controls are keyboard+mouse.
But me? I can't use these stupid tiny-ass analog thumbsticks. They're so bad that games need to have aim-assist built-in.
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I don't doubt that you don't do that well with thumbsticks as I've got my problems with them either (34). I do well with full sized joysticks, even when using one in each hand, which is what it takes when you play modern space sims with 6DoF flight. But I also play a bit of RTS and FPS games and know from experience that there's a high number of young players that do pretty well. It's especially true for those games that mostly favour twitc
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As you have already correctly identified, twitch-based games put us old folks at a disadvantage. But the more tactical and psychological a game gets, the more we manage to complete or out-compete younger players. We tend to excel at games where stealth and planning along with "playing the players" is the road to winning.
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The vast majority of players are not professional eSports players.
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No, we tend to have real jobs.
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Kids don't have the hand dexterity to hold a pencil, this also translates to not having the hand dexterity to drive or operate power tools later in life.
To say nothing of hand tools like tweezers, chisels and knives, which are incredibly useful, but require precision and control.
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They have probably never seen any of those things, due to the health and safety risk.
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paintbrushes. Watercolors are still a thing, right?
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children have no use for pencils and pens anymore. Everything is typed out.
I don't even think this is remotely true. My first-grader does all her assignments in pencil. Also, both my kids have been enthusiastic about coloring since they could hold a crayon, at age 15. No, kidding, from age 1. Our modern world also has all kinds of things I couldn't get as a kid, like books with a coating of dark/flaky stuff that you scratch off with a wooden stylus (kind of like the lottery ticket gray stuff) to reveal pictures or make your own designs. Let me tell you, kids will go town on that s
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Are we all going to become brain surgeons? So what's the point? Can you explain why " Hand / Eye Coordination " would be an important metric?
- You stepped on a splinter. Are you going to use a sharp knife and pincers to remove it without breaking it, or are you going to sit down, cry and wait for an ambulance?
- A wire came lose in your expensive keyboard, amplifier, headphones, vaporizer, guitar or whatever. Are you going to spend a minute with a soldering iron fixing it, or spend hours looking for somewhere that can repair it, or toss it and buy new?
- Your child comes crying with a broken toy and asks if you can fix it.
- You received a hand w
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Perhaps the need to hold a pencil will not be needed in the future.
Everyone who is posting using a pencil or stylus, please raise your hands . . . ?
I have terrible hand-writing and therefore took an after school typing class in 9th grade, back in the late '70s.
Since then, I rarely write anything; just type. In the early 80's, in the terminal room while I was studying CS, I often pitied the poor folks hen-pecking in their code at a snail's pace.
About the only time I take a pen in my hand, is when I need to put a signature on something.
Handwriting can be a fine art, and
Re:Coming biological mutation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Coming biological mutation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is -- different usages build different areas of muscles. And the brain learns different types of movements.
When growing up, one summer I used to bike 40km to work at age 16. 80km round trip. I'd work a physical job for a full shift, and return. And growing up in the country, overall I was in fairly good shape. Lots and lots of outdoor/physical chores.
And clearly, one is in excellent shape when doing the above 5 days a week.
Anyhow, I took up water skying. For the first week, I could barely *stand* after a mere 15 minutes. My legs would shake. Part of my leg muscles were not even used in bicycling, walking, and whatever else I did.
People talk about 'swimmer's bodies' and all that, but there is truth to it. Different activities use different muscles, and using a pen/pencil is the same sort of thing. And then, on top of that, the brain needs to learn the specific / fine motions akin to that specific action.
I'm positive that gross hand/eye coordination is improved with playing games. And typing. But, if you've never typed? All the video game playing in the world, won't provide you with the strength and coordination to make all those repetitive typing movements. Your body still needs training.
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Typing, at least typing the proper way, also builds up hand strength. Hunt and peck with 2 fingers does not. If you really want to build hand strength, make them learn to play the piano.
You are talking about typing on a real typewriter (if you know what I'm talking about), then I agree that your fingers/hands will build up some muscle. However, if you are talking about computer keyboard, I highly doubt that it really help building up fingers/hands muscle that much.
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Depends. Using an old IBM-Keyboard (you know, the ones that are bulletproof up to 9mm)...
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I take it you have never used an upright Imperial.
I am guessing he did not mean a Vaio laptop keyboard or SInclair ZX81.
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I have terrible handwriting too, and terrible typing skills for someone who does it every day, a lot. But I take written notes. The reason is that I can scrawl faster than I can type, although I'm the only one who could ever read it and make sense of it. The formulation of ideas that you're on the receiving end of has been pretty well shown to enhance the recall of them later. It cements the memories in your brain and allows your mind to process them further. For me, the only way to get this effect is to sc
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I expect it is more environmental then biological.
However when I was a kid I had the same problems, and still I hold my pencil with the death grip that everyone tells me is wrong, yet no-one has showed me the correct way where the pencil doesn't just fall out of my hand.
So prolonged writing tires my hand out. And you can see that in my writing where the first few paragraphs are done with easy to read hand writing (Cursive or in print) then it degrades down to unreadable near the end.
When I learned to write
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Bottom line it is always the teachers.
There are enthusiastic teachers with great results but you have to expect them to burn out.
There are teachers that just teach facts and basic stuff instead of principles and concepts.
But there are also school systems problems. E.g. in Germany correct spelling, especially of foreign languages is so over rated, a person that had B grades in England or France would have a D or even E in Germany. Well, that was at my time. I have heard it has improved, but never checked it.
Re:Coming biological mutation? (Score:4, Funny)
stop ogling that mirror.
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If that's the case, shouldn't he also be very acquainted with something pencil sized?
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if you had a girlfriend, sheâ(TM)d be very acquainted with something pencil sized
You're acquainted with something much smaller than a pencil that is quite vacuous between your ears.
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Judging by your writing, I see you're working there. Good for you!
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In the 80's, you were not a huge tech kid. You were a nerd.
I'm glad that most people also have to use tech now, because it means that unlike the 80's, now they NEED us.
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Do you know about penisland [tvtropes.org]?
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It's not just about handwriting. If they don't have the strength and coordination to hold a pencil properly, how are they going to handle a soldering iron?!