What were you doing at the age of five?

If you were anything like me, there is a good chance that you were sword dueling with sticks, climbing trees, falling out of trees, throwing berries at parked cars, and running in circles. Great, those are all perfectly acceptable 5-year-old activities. I also distinctly remember being exposed to computers at a young age. My family Apple II had a Muppet keyboard (or was it Sesame Street?) and dysentery was the greatest of scourges to my Oregon Trail party, the educational game of one family’s adventure across 19^th century America while braving the dangers of the unsettled west including wild animals, hunger, and bowel disease.

So now I try to imagine what I would do at age 5 with my very own iPad, and the answer is, not much. Well, I suppose that’s not entirely accurate. The iPad would probably be the greatest device I ever had for about 2 weeks, after which it would be in multiple pieces swimming in a pool of orange juice at the bottom of my backpack.

This was my first thought when I heard about Auburn, Maine’s pilot program where $200,000 will be spent on 285 children for iPad 2s and related expenses to help teach reading and writing. So, $700 per student will be spent on a device that will probably never survive the school year. On the other hand, it amounts to 2 dollars a day per student, which really isn’t a huge amount of money considering the school budget for this year is $36 million. To put it into perspective, the $200,000 experiment (which covers the entire kindergarten class in the district) will cost about as much as gasoline for one semester. I’d argue that the comparison is a fair one, as both the iPad’s and the gasoline should be considered expendable.

It is important to remember that this is a pilot program, a test run. Before people get too upset over wasted tax dollars, they should keep in mind that if the program fails, for whatever reason, it won’t be continued. I think the biggest concern should be if it succeeds. If the Auburn School Department concludes that iPads really do improve a childrens ability to learn as young as 5 years old, how much of the school budget are taxpayers willing to invest in technology?