Friday, July 01, 2005

The dangers of children using computers

My youngest daughter (4 years old) has developed a habit of "doing her writing" at the computer. This involved opening a document in Open Office, and typing random letters into it. From time to time, she hits the "paste" key by mistake, and something gets stuck into the text that was left there by the last user. Occasionally, she types a list of the names she can remember (pretty well! Good old Foundation Stage), or her older sister helps her embed a series of names. Occasionally we see the keys have been pressed in sequence. But for the most part, it is just random letter sequences. "To be or not to be" hasn't appeared yet.

I thought this was a mostly harmless activity. However, I am typing something at the moment, and when I tried to type "point", the auto-complete kicked in after three letters to suggest: "poiiuyrewefoplmkjklpoiyyujpoloiuytrewqaasdfdfgvvlpoie- rfgvbhhynmjuiklopaqzzzlkjhcfrt7iop".
I think I ought to go and tidy up my auto-complete dictionary ....