Gadget of the year

The amazing teaching pen

Is this little device set to become bigger than the iPod? Well it doesn’t store hundreds of tunes – it doesn’t have the cool cachet of the jukebox on the go – but it has begun to take the American education system by storm. What is it? It’s a teaching computer in a pen – and it talks to you!

Fly – the talking pen
Leapfrog, the fastest growing toy company in history, has invested a cool $100 million in developing this astonishing piece of technology, the Fly – a $99 pen that teaches.

Check out the wonderful demo on http://www.flypentop.com The demo is a work of art in itself. You can use the electronic talking pen on-screen to create and record music, do some language learning, perform maths calculations and even play games like hangman and match the pairs.

Simply draw a rough keyboard and some drums on their special paper and you’ll be able to play tunes, change scale, use backbeats and even record your composition. Write a date, time and activity and it’ll be in your diary with an alarm and reminders. Spelling is also taught along with loads of tests. Draw a calculator and it will do the maths, even teach you long division and algebra, step-by-step with formative feedback. But the real WOW feature is language learning. Use the pen to write a word, in either French or English, and the pen will translate and speak the word back to you. How cool is that?

Seven second rule

What Margriff, the founder and very smart inventor within the company, really specialises in is ‘learning’. He understands that the technology is simple but the content is hard. Magriff used what he calls the ‘seven second rule’, the idea that the basic unit of human attention is seven seconds. This he has tested out in his lab with an impressive board of academic specialists. The Leapad, their most successful learning devices invented gives feedback every seven seconds.

It’s the audio feedback that makes this device so compelling. Kids don’t have to learn to hear but they do have to learn how to read, so hearing is the better feedback mechanism. This is strangely liberating compared to screen-based feedback. It’s seems as though you are doing the thinking IN your own head as opposed to looking AT a screen.

A technological marvel

The pen is a technological marvel including character recognition, text-to speech software, voice decompression and multi-channel polyphonic music. It’s voice output understands more than 70,000 words and will pronounce almost anything. The really clever part is the nib, which is actually an infra-red camera that reads everything it writes at 75 frames a second. The special paper ($5 for 75 sheets) has a mesh of dots so that the pen knows where it’s been. Then there’s the upgrade slot for cartridges to add functionality. Clever or what?

Glimpse of the future

We are on the verge of creating simple devices that will transform learning. This is only the start, and what a start. Leapfrog technology has already proven its worth and is hugely popular in the US, now being used in tens of thousands of classrooms. The future of e-learning may well turn out to be through these small, mobile devices in the hands of real learners.

Want to see more? Want to get your hands on one? Come to see us on Stand 62 at Learning Technologies 2006. We'll be demonstrating how it works and will give one away to the winner of our Learning Technologies competition.