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.