Do you suffer from high-tech handwriting syndrome?
The answer is yes if you:
A) Are a whiz on the keyboard, but when it come to writing it’s like your hand has totally forgotten how to hold a pen.
B) Have found yourself squinting down at your shopping list with no idea of what you have written.
C) Are you using the note pad on your phone instead of pen and paper, because you can text quicker than you can write.
High-tech handwriting syndrome is maybe not quite a medically certified ‘syndrome’ as such, but it is actually a growing concern for parents, but more particularly for kids.
With our generation of digital natives doing more learning via keyboards and word documents than we ever did, the elegant art of handwriting is going by the wayside. But being able to handwrite legibly and quickly is not just a ‘nice’ thing to do, it’s actually an important skill for kids to learn, particularly for exams like the H.S.C.
With this in mind, 19-year-olds Jasmine and Cassandra Koczka have come up with a fantastic low-tech solution to the problem of high-tech handwriting.
The WriteWeight writing aid is a small weight that you attach to the end of your pen in order to ‘train’ the muscles in your hand used for writing.
The Sydney based twins came up with the idea when they were just 16 and both doing their school certificate exams.
Jasmine’s handwriting was so bad that her exam answers were barely legible and she found she couldn’t physically write as quickly as she needed to. Jasmine’s problem was also widespread amongst her peers, so the budding entrepreneurs saw their gap in the market.
When developing their product, they conducted a month long trial on their classmates at school and found that across the board, everyone’s legibility and speed improved.
Their nifty little ‘weight-training’ for the hand is available from their website.
Do your kids struggle with handwriting? Is handwriting something that you think is focused on enough these days?
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