The eldest wee lad is almost 4. He loves the Octonauts. His favourite two phrases are “I want to do it all by myself” and “we could make one of those”. He likes to be in control.
He is learning his letters in a pretty unstructured, self learning way, where he asks questions about them when they interest him. He understands that letters give access to “stuff” on the iPad / phone / computer when you can’t find an icon or a thumbnail of what you are after.
He types ‘co’ to bring up the ‘octocompass’ on my iPhone because the icon is hard to find. The iPhone search rewards this with a wee icon of the compass. He clicks it. He wins.
The BBC iplayer search is terrible for him.
So yesterday, at the end of an episode, he copies what daddy does – and clicks in the search box. He then starts hunting for letters. He makes a couple of mistakes but he does ok.
This is how the iPlayer search rewards his search for OCTONOTS.
No results. Personally, I think he did pretty ok, I’d let him watch Peso and the crew for that effort. The iPlayer search is just being mean. Like witholding pudding unless he says please.
So please, iPlayer team, make the search a little more forgiving, especially for kids stuff..
Steven Milne 