I have an eleven year old son who has autism. He is a delightful boy who has made great strides, many of which I can attribute to technology. As you know we are big Apple fans in our household. My son uses our iMac daily for homework, and one of his favorite things to earn is time on his iPod Touch for doing his chores.
Even though my son struggles with daily tasks and language, he has always seemed to be right at home with his iPod Touch. We were amazed at how quickly he learned how to use it! He has had his 2nd generation iPod for three years now, and it is entirely full of games and educational apps. I can definitely say it has helped improve both his receptive and expressive language as he has read books, looked at flashcards, and played his favorite games.
Two months ago, my son came rushing home from school. A friend had told him his favorite game Angry Birds would be soon coming out with a new version: Angry Birds Space! My husband and I joked there was no way he would be able to wait. For two months every person my son saw in public, he would go right up to them and tell them about the new Angry Birds Space. He was so excited!
Fast forward to this morning at 6:00 am. My little guy came rushing into my room with his iPod in hand, ready for me to download the new game. He was grinning from ear to ear. He even had his favorite red stuffed Angry Bird under his arm that he had slept with that night!
I groggily accepted his iPod, typed in our iTunes password, and thought I would soon roll back into a deep sleep. Unfortunately, this happened…
Noooooo!
What the what?
Tell me friends, how do you explain to an eleven year old handicapped boy that Rovio did not make the new game entirely iPod friendly?
Turns out, the 1st and 2nd generation iPod Touch aren’t the only iPods getting sliced in the latest version. Have an iPhone 3G?
Not going to work there either.
I completely understand Rovio was going for better graphic quality and needed the hardware to sustain it, but doen’t this just justify Apple even more in making us think our older versions of iPods and iPhones are eventually going to be yesterdays trash? It would have been nice to have a little bit of a heads up in all of their promotion to warn those of us with excited children, that the game MAY not work with all hardware devices. This way I could have prepared my son by letting him know that while he can play it on the iPad, he’s not going to be able to play it on his “obsolete” iPod Touch. The other thing they could have done was release a version that could runs on older hardware. This way the people who have upgraded hardware can take full advantage of the awesome graphics, and those who don’t can still play a great game.
Back to my concerned son…
Luckily for us, we have an iPad too. My son was finally able to spend a few minutes this morning trying out the new game.
But for the majority of the morning, it kinda went like this:
I had to place two phone calls this morning. One to his bus driver, and one to his school, just giving them a heads up about how upset he was.
To be honest, I probably should have kept him home. Seems a little crazy though to keep a young boy home from school all because of Angry Birds. 🙁
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I somehow missed that you also had a child on the spectrum my 4 oldest all have aspergers. I can totally relate to mornings like this. I don’t remeber where you live in the valley but have you heard of Spectrum acadamy? My kids have been here for 2 years now and the school is amazing. Hope angry birds space wises up and shares a lower graphic version. Mine love angry bird too!
Natalie is the one with the child on the spectrum, so maybe you were thinking I had written the post. I downloaded Angry Birds Space today too for my Android tablet. I like it! It’s very different.