Muscle-memory programmer [Resources-Hands On]

For IEEE Spectrum\´s special issue this past June, my colleague Ariel Bleicher visited Tad Starner\´s lab at Georgia Tech and tried out an intriguing kind of wearable technology: a computerized glove equipped with five vibration motors, one perched atop each finger. Wearing the glove for a couple of hours while attending to other tasks, she acquired sufficient "muscle memory" to play 61 notes of Beethoven\´s "Ode to Joy" with hardly any effort. Wow. Of course, learning to play a more complicated piano melody would take more than just a couple of hours wearing such a glove. But her success immediately got me thinking about a problem I\´d been grappling with: how to get my kids to learn to touch-type.