As many people can attest, iPads make wondeful computing devices for young children.  Whereas a computer’s mouse or trackpad is difficult for a toddler to maneuver, the iPad’s intuitive touch interface is easy for them.  Not surprisingly, there are thousands of games and educational apps targeted at the under six crowd.

One type of app I thought would be a good fit for my daughter is the “learn to read” category.  Ayelet had learned to recognized all of the letters of the alphabet before age two, and we had spent several months working on letter sounds.  However, she hadn’t made much progress beyond that.  I haven’t been worried, since she is well ahead of where I would have expected her to be, but a game that would help her work on her sounds seemed like a good idea.  Besides, it would be a much better activity than her preferred application – YouTube.

One app that I found that I really like is abc Pocket Phonics: Letter Sounds & Writing.  It shows a bunch of letters, and a voice makes a letter sound.  The player needs to tap the letter that makes the right sound.  After a couple of letters, a word is formed, and the voice helpfully sounds it out.

This is just the right level for Ayelet – she basically knows the sounds, but she needs reinforcement, and she needs to learn about putting them together.  And while she enjoys it, I quickly noticed that unless I monitor her, she runs into a problem:

It’s so easy to press the letters, she just starts pressing letters for the fun of it.  Eventually she will hit the right one, and the game will continue.  Even if it’s a letter she knows well, she gets tempted to press away.  In the example above, you can see that even when she finds the “N” in the firstword, she makes no effort to apply that to the next word.

I suspected that she could do better, so I tried to do it the old fashioned way.  I grabbed a bunch of letter blocks, dumped them on the table, and played the same game.  I would make a sound, and she would pick the letter:

Without the instant gratification of letters vanishing as she touches them, Ayelet is forced to actually think about each letter, and she really shows off what she knows.  It also provides some teachable moments – when I ask her which letter makes the “Aaaa” sound, she claims there are two letters that make the sound, holding up the “E”.  To her, the distinction between the two sounds is very subtle, and it provides an opportunity to emphasize the difference.

Of course, there are the downsides.  Ayelet’s three-year-old mind easily wanders (in the video, she starts talking about her favorite color), and without the instant feedback, it requires some effort to keep her on task.  Clearly it’s not easy to be the teacher.

The iPad clearly has some advantages; it has rich media, it can keep the child engaged, and it will have patience to work with her endlessly, versus the half hour I might spend after work.  It’s great for reinforcing lessons that the child already knows but needs to practice.

But when it comes to real learning, it won’t replace the patience and attention of a real teacher.

We have an old Bose Wave Radio sitting in our kitchen.  We used to have a CD player hooked up to it, but that has long since broken, and who listens to CD’s anymore, anyways?  These days, the Bose is mostly used to play NPR.

With increasing frequency, however, we find ourselves wanting to play content on our iPhones in the kitchen.  Sometimes this is because our three year old wants to dance to music, or I am doing dishes and would like to continue to listen to my NPR podcasts rather than whatever random call-in show is currently playing on NPR.

While we have an auxiliary cable that allows us to hook our iPhones up to the Bose, it doesn’t get used very much.  The plug is too wide for the headphone jack hole in the phone’s protective case, which means that we have to take it out of the case to use it.  More importantly, once we do this, our phone is tethered to that corner of the room.  It becomes a pain to go back to send an email, look something up on the web, or answer a phone call.  Instead we tend to just crank up the volume on the phone to the max and listen to the comparably tinny speaker.

With iOS 4.2, Apple released AirPlay support, which allows iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches to stream music and video over the wireless network to another device.  This is most often discussed in the context of Apple TV, which is not much use to us.  Our television is up on the 3^rd floor, far from the kitchen, and it’s still an old, standard definition set that doesn’t support the Apple TV’s HDMI output (To learn more about why we are one of the last families in America with a standard definition TV, you can read about my over-the-air TiVo setup).

What I recently learned is that Apple TV is not the only device that supports AirPlay.  The Airport Express, Apple’s stripped down wireless station, also supports AirPlay with iOS devices.  While the Airport Express can act as a wireless router, it can also function as a node on an existing network.  It provides an auxiliary jack that can hook it into a stereo, thereby allowing it bring music from anywhere in the house to a stereo system, all without wires.

I decided to pick one up for my birthday (as my father always says, the best thing about a birthday present you buy yourself is that you get what you want, and you know the person who got it really cares) and see if it would work.  While it should have been pretty straightforward to get it working, I did have to work through a couple of issues.

The biggest problem was getting it to attach to our wireless network.  While it should be simple, it turns out I had problems because we are still on the old WEP security model.  I know we can switch to something higher, but I have never bothered since I’m not too worried about protecting my network from anything beyond the casual passerby or neighbor trying to steal wifi.  The Airport configuration utility recognized the network as WEP but kept trying to set it up as a WEP 128 bit device.  After this failed multiple times, I looked at other options and saw that there was a WEP 40 bit.  I was never aware there were multiple versions of WEP, but I tried this instead, and it started working instantly.

The second problem was that my phone did not initially “see” the Airport Express.  I gave it a reboot, and then it started working.

Now, when I play music on the iPhone, it somehow magically becomes aware that there is an Airport Express on the wireless network and shows an Airplay icon in the iPod controls:

When I press it, it gives me options for playing the audio through the “iPhone” or through the “Kitchen Airport Express”, which is what I named the device when I set it up.  Music starts streaming through the Bose Wave Radio, giving me the full Bose quality of sound, but leaving me free to walk around the house with my phone and do other tasks on it.

Part of the beauty is also that anyone in the house with an iPhone can use it.  My wife is already getting more use out of it than I am.