My wife is home schooling our 4 children - the oldest is 7. Although there is probably little or no market for Microsoft Surface applications for children I've recently become interested in the idea of using Surface for home education.

The idea of using Surface in this way really hit home when I started teaching my two oldest how to use a Mac to practice their spelling and for painting. I'm using an old G3 laptop so I don't care much if they break it.

Watching the children interact with the G3 has been interesting. The trackpad is challenging for them and clicking on small menu bars and icons is also difficult. They have gotten better, but the act of launching applications is still a mystery. Actually, the children have sort of lost interest in the computer and don't play with much now.

The loss of interest may be because of a couple of reasons. We have not exposed them to computers (other than an occasional session with my iPhone) until I gave them the G3. We also don't have a TV or video games so our kids are not used to interacting with a screen. The second reason is that its too tedious and the reward to low when working with the traditional keyboard and track pad. I'm convinced that a Microsoft Surface device would be a much easier and rewarding experience.

I was really pleased this morning to discover a blog entry by Richard Wand (a.k.a. Wandy) of Conchango who introduced his 4 year old, Bel, to the Surface this week. It turns out that Wandy had observed the same difficulty with his little girl when using tradition GUI applications. But when his daughter Bel started working with the Surface unit at Wandy's work she had a much easier experience. Wandy does a great job of documenting the experience and its worth reading.

Bel's experience illuminates a couple areas where Surface would need to be modified for children the first being the attract screen. I would imagine that its difficult to children to figure out that the corner access points did anything interesting. Also even if discovered I doubt kids that age would make the connection without accidentally hitting it a couple of times.

I'm excited about the prospect of using Surface to teach children and I plan to start designing applications for children as my first forays into Surface application development. After all, if you can design applications that are easy for small children to use than most adults would be able to use them too.