I am from Sweden and my wife from China hence our children are bilingual by birth. To help our 5 year old daughter (the one in my avatar)with her Chinese we have put her in a normal state run Chinese grade 1 class in Hangzhou for half a year. They have daily homework and I tested skritter with her in cram mode. Works superb. Since she can't really read English that much yet we have to sit with her and ask her the questions but the thing is that it makes it more fun for her to study. She still have to sit and write on paper as well to get those perfect strokes her teacher requires but it is a fun and relaxing way of testing her on past learned characters. Since her spoken Chinese is like 100 times better than mine she is helping me with the oral part and we do the writing part together. Skritter can really be a family activity. My wife laugh her pants of when she is listening to my daughter trying to correct her fathers poor pronunciation as a reward for getting the last character correct. Each time she get the character correct I have to construct a silly sentence that contains that character. Amazing how those silly things stuck even in my old brain. Now my daughter is the one that asks me to get connected and "play" skritter. Her teachers have gotten very interested in this tools since it really helps her. I second another post about letting Chinese use skritter for their own training. I think it could help both during their own training in school ( most students today do have computers and Internet) and when they are grown up.

I love this idea (and the very cute story!) If you are interested in working together on a pilot/trial with your daughter's teachers to see how much we'd need to change to optimize it for native speakers, send me an email at doug@skritter-dot-com.

@mandarinboy Great story! That sounds like a wonderful way to learn together.

Awwwwwwwwwww! That sounds adorable.

@doug, I have mailed you.
It is in fact very nice. My other daughter is only 1 so she is more interested in chewing on the tablet pen but she will be a skitter user one day as well:-)

Todays children get so exposed to computers that they literally have it with their mothers milk. My oldest one did for a long time skip the comforter and used a USB Cable, the one with rubber surface. She liked to hold the cable and suck on the rubber surfaced connector. Probably not good with all the bisfenol in them but at that time I did not know better.

I plan to do this too. I somehow think a tablet would be better than a wacom input pad. I think the kid may like to see the lines drawn under the pen.

I was going to get a Dell Streak but now I think I'm going to wait. There should be dozens of tablets that run Flash by the end of the year. I would be interested in people talking about which tablet is best. The iPad is a non-starter because Jobs hates Flash. And I understand converting from Flash to HTML 5 requires a total rewrite and that Skritter has no plans for this currently.

We have very tentative plans for an iPhone/iPad app, but nothing definite yet. It is still something we intend to start working on before too long.

@mandarinboy
That is so neat!

@nick
I have an iphone I would LOVE some app with this. That would help me practice so much more. :D I can't wait! Thank you for being so hard working and making skritter such a great way to learn Chinese.

You could also write it in HTML5, instead of an iPhone app. Either way will take a lot of work. I can't really say which way to go in terms of marketing or technical concerns.