There’s a new addition to the Adafruit family, and it’s not a microcontroller board as you’d expect – however, we will still find plenty to learn from. On the Adafruit blog, [Phillip Torrone] shares a set of high-contrast images with us; the idea for such images is that they’re more appealing for a child during the first few months of its life, and not just that – they can support a kid’s development, too. The idea behind high-contrast images is twofold. During the first few months of life, a baby’s visual systems are only taking shape, and are nowhere near being advanced – so, sources of easily discernible and varied visual input can help it develop, as well as, perhaps, aid in holding attention.
The second part is – they look nice in their own way, and one would hope that a baby can appreciate them in the same way parents do. The images are quite varied, with some being somewhat electronics-themed (including an Adafruit logo, of course) and many being fairly neutral, which has to be an upside for us hackers when it comes to the spouse acceptance factor. For any of us interested, there are downloadable PDFs and
In a way, these are just like AprilTags – aiming to be helpful in development of visual algorithms. With such a family, we can’t wait to see what comes next – computer engineering books? Baby monitors with machine learning? Sleep-data-driven knit blankets? No matter what’s in store for us, we hope that for the Adafruit family, this journey will be smooth sailing.
yay, lets advertise to our kids with learning tools, what next coca-cola nursery rhymes. /j
The adafruit logo i get, but including the Starbucks logo seems such a weird choice to me.
Why โindoctrinateโ your children from such an early age? Symbols that connect us to our childhood are strong, why give a company the power to exploit them for profit?
hmm just noticed! this isn’t really a Starbucks logo – defo a riff on it, but re-done in a tech-y way.
it’s great, but it definitely miss the jolly-wrencher…
Definitely, it’s not like he doesn’t know it exists… :b
Clipart is newsworthy how? Or is this some kind of ‘life hack’? Hack-an-infant.
It’s a hack, in a sense. Babies need easier-to-read glyphs. It’s relevant to me at least because my friend it making an app to help special-needs children communicate. Although Phillip here is targeting a younger age group – I don’t think his glyphs are meant to have real-world meaning, they’re just visually interesting
imagine how nice it is to live inside a rave of stimulus. you are going to fry the baby brain.
So, aside from all the other criticisms of the subject matter, my question is, is it at all effective to expose a person who is trying to learn how to process visual data, to Escher???
With our second set of twins I got a small LED/LCD projector and projected movies such as Koyaanisqatsi onto the ceiling above their cots. Not sure what effect it would have long term but they seemed happy and relaxed, and were rarely any trouble r.e. going to sleep etc.
My wife literally just tasked me with plotting some of these for our little guy (2 months out). Will indoctrinate my hacker from birth!
I like the CMB plushie. Starting the education early, as it should.