An Unexpected Toy

I was born in the ’90s so I remember a time in my life without the influence of computers. But my sister and I started using computers in late elementary school, and during our last year of homeschool, our parents made my dad’s old computer, the “homeschool” computer. It’s where my sister and I would play computer games, learned to type, logged into our Webkinz accounts, and where we’d later log into our first social media account (Shoutlife, if you were curious). It was also at the desk where my mom often made homeschool lesson plans and graded our assignments.

My sister and I didn’t have cell phones until about 7th grade and we certainly didn’t have smartphones with fancy data plans until about 10th grade, and we grew up in a world where we didn’t have a tablet with kids games, though I’ll admit we got Nintendo DS in late elementary school. But we certainly went back to our other non-tech toys plenty.

So what is the unexpected toy? Microsoft office, oddly enough my sister and I got to play with an old laptop my Dad was given and noticed it had a word processor, and I figured out how to open Powerpoint and how to work the basic printer we had. So when my sister and I decided to make a “hospital” for our plush animals/toys I decided to make signs for it in PowerPoint, I found a cartoon picture of a waiting room, and a surgical doctor among other things in clip art and made a slide to print out and hang around my room, so our little animals would know where to go. We’d also “check them in” at our old little laptop, I mean it was really just instead of a paper list, but I felt cool typing it in.

The difference between this and what I see today is that we made it an addition to our toys, the technology itself wasn’t the toy. It was fun to pretend we had a fancy system, but then we’d step away from the computer and play games with our toys in our designated “waiting room”, and take out a toy stethoscope in our “doctor’s office”. Plus we learned about something that has quite genuinely come in handy throughout school and beyond. Technology may have a place in childhood, but I believe the value is in it being a fun addition.