My daughter, a giant Cookie Monster fan, received the Count 'N Crunch Cookie Monster for Christmas. I was very excited to see this gift, as it will be fun for her to play with, as well as educational.
For those of you who aren't familiar with this particular version of Cookie Monster, I'll explain. It's a basic plush Cookie Monster -- not too big, which is nice. He's in a sitting position and wearing a plastic backpack. His mouth hinges open and he talks when you press his foot.
The idea is that he asks you to feed him cookies, and he counts them as you do. As you insert them into his mouth, they trigger a small plastic switch before falling into the backpack. This is great, but he ONLY counts to three. Three! Seems to me an educational toy -- made by Hasbro and branded as Sesame Street -- should at least count to 10. I'd even be happy if he counted to five.
One thing I did notice, however, is that Cookie Monster is polite. At one point, he burped and then said "excuse me." At least he is teaching my daughter manners -- he's got that going for him.
While it's a cute idea, I don't think it was executed very well. And, I'm sad to say, I think grandma wasted about $30.
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When my younger boy was learning to talk he thought that "too much" was a fixed quantity. I would always encourage him to learn the motor skills required to dispense his own food, so in his high chair he would try his best to decanter mustard, ketchup or syrup, and if he managed to drown his food I would say, "Brad, you took too much". It seemed to make sense to him, "one, two, two much.....".
So when he'd ask for a cookie I would ask, "How many do you want?" He would think for a moment, and I imagine that he pictured his plate overflowing with cookies and would say, "too much".
There's no way it's a problem of memory cost. I do wonder if Battar's point isn't the real answer--10 cookies is an awful lot and might have parents screaming about unhealthy diets.
Well, we don't want to send kids the message that it's okay to eat more than three cookies at a time, do we? At that point, they should switch to carrot sticks or something healthy.
Seriously, memory is so cheap these days that it seems like it should be easy enough to have Cookie Monster count to 100.
If you did this, you would also want a subroutine to re-initialize the count after a certain amount of idle time (probably about 2-3 minutes).
Let's say your daughter is playing with the toy and then goes to bed. You didn't say how old she is, but if you've bought this toy for her, presumably she is just learning to count. If she pops her first cookie in Cookie Monster's mouth the next morning, and he says "72" instead of "1," she's going to be very confused. He really needs to start from "1" every time.
Alternatively, you could add a sensor in the backpack so that the count re-initializes every time you take the cookies back out. I think this would be ideal from a learning perspective, but would be more difficult to implement.
I can definitely see a new Gadget Freak column coming out of this...
Well, you could try to get to the microprocessor that controls it and reprogram it to count to 10. I know that is what my sons would do. My older one would probably make sure that Linux was installed as well.
Think it all the way through. For the monster to count to 10, you would have to supply you daughter with 10 cookies. After retrieving them from the backpack, she will then eat them. All 10. It's lunch time in a couple of hours.
Good point, Jennifer! I mean, seriously, they couldn't make him count to 10 at least? Those designing educational toys shouldn't try to pass them on cute factor alone.
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