The Willow Glen Resident Software by Willow Glen couple was designed for preschool children BabyWow! teaches everyday objects in eight languages By Michelle Ku Ten years ago, the sight of an infant or toddler banging away at a computer keyboard was rare to behold, but a Willow Glen company has created software for use by the preverbal set. Created, produced and marketed by Willow Glen residents Tony and Kathy Fernandes, babyWow! is an infant and toddler stimulation software designed as an educational tool for parents to use with their children. Released in July, babyWow! is interactive software with more than 300 photographs of everyday objects and 2,000 words in eight languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. Tony Fernandes, CEO of BowWow House, thought it was important that the software include different languages because he wanted it to reflect the multicultural reality in the United States and internationally. Also, exposing infants and toddlers to different languages helps them later on. "The sounds a child learns in the first two years of life are the ones they know for the rest of their lives," Fernandes said. Current research shows a correlation between the number and variety of words an infant hears and the child's IQ. "I think of [babyWow!] as the mother of all speak-and-say toys. It doesn't have a song-and-dance-type entertainment with a lot of music. The reason is because the vocabulary and speech have scientifically been proven to help later on in life," Fernandes said. A little more than two years ago, Fernandes noticed that his son Sean, who was 6 months old at the time, had a fascination with the keyboard. "I noticed he was really interested in the computer keyboard. He liked the way it felt in pressing the buttons and stuff." Unsure about whether Sean's fascination with the keyboard was an isolated case, Fernandes began talking to other parents and learned that their children had also discovered keyboards at a young age. "So I started thinking about ways that a computer could be beneficial for children. I went out and looked at what kinds of things would benefit children, and I happened across a huge body of research on infant and toddler stimulation and how that correlates to the child's IQ later on in life," Fernandes said. Fernandes turned Sean's fascination with the keyboard into a hobby by creating small programs using different images and sounds. After creating quite a few programs for Sean, Fernandes and wife Kathy, BowWow House's vice president of marketing, thought it would be a good idea to market the software to other parents. "It got to be such a big program that we thought, why should we just do this for Sean? We thought that since other kids liked to use the computer, it would be good for them as well," Kathy said. Unlike other software available for infants and toddlers, babyWow! uses realistic images instead of animation. "It was amazing to me how much of the research had been really ignored by the software industry, and I wanted to create a product that really addresses all of these findings and attempted to be truly beneficial to the child rather than mind candy. I didn't want them to stare at it and go into a catatonic state like they do when they watch TV," Fernandes said. Laura Tessera, a former neighbor of the Fernandeses who recently moved to Tracy, used other software with her now 212-year-old daughter, Madison. "What I didn't like about those was you always had to press the button or get the question right. Also, Madison likes to watch Barney or Sesame Street. She likes things that are real. On the software, it was cartoon characters. I'd turn on the computer, and five minutes later she wasn't interested anymore," Tessera said. It was different when Madison uses babyWow!, Tessera said. "My husband speaks to Madison in Italian. When the Italian comes on the program, she's like, 'What is this? I understand this, too.' When we first started using the software, she started saying a lot more Italian phrases. I think it's great. Plus, Italian is not a standard language that most programs carry." Since its release in July, babyWow! sales have exceeded all expectations. "We thought we'd get one or two sales a week. Right now, we have over 200 orders--several from outside the country. We're getting ready to press our second edition," Kathy said. While the Fernandeses were the driving force in the creation of babyWow!, the project was a community effort. The neighbors were asked what they wanted in a stimulation software for their kids. Also, the software was tested by the children in the neighborhood. Even the final name of the product was a neighborhood effort, Tessera said. BabyWow! is not in stores. For more information go to www.babywow.com or call 264-4334. [ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Willow Glen Resident, September 23, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.