Our little one loves buttons. Cameras, camcorders, remote controls…if it has buttons, she’ll make a beeline for it. But keyboards seem to really attract her attention. It seems like she’s figured out that banging on the keyboard makes things happen on the screen. Well, I say “banging,” but there’s some skill there. She’s not so good with the single keys, but she has an amazing knowledge of obscure key combinations. Need to hide that toolbar you always use but can’t remember if it’s ctrl+X+Y or alt+x+Y? No problem! Just give her 10 seconds at the keyboard and it’s gone. Unfortunately, she’s not so good at returning things back to their original state. Luckily, we’ve been able to recover from her keyboarding sessions so far, but we knew we had to find another solution before she discovered something we couldn’t recover from. So you can imagine how happy we were to learn about Babysplat.
Babysplat displays colorful shapes and plays sounds with each key press. Yes, it’s that simple. But like most simple things, it just works. When this program is full-screen our daughter can bang away at the keyboard with abandon. The only key that appears to still cause trouble is the Windows key: pushing it shrinks Babysplat down to a normal window. This isn’t a problem on my pre-Windows 95 IBM “clackey” keyboard since it doesn’t have a Windows key, but it something to be aware of on modern keyboards. It’s not a big deal because a simple click on the “maximize button” returns it to full-screen, but I’d prefer if there was a key combination to control the window. Of course then our daughter would figure it out.
There’s a similar program, AlphaBaby available for Mac OS X. Unlike Babysplat’s simple geometric shapes, AlphaBaby speaks the letters as they are pressed and can be customized with your own sounds and pictures.
These aren’t the only programs available, but they’re small, simple and free. Yes, I know we could also solve the problem by not letting her play with the keyboard, but where’s the fun in that? 
