Remember those field trips on the school bus? Saving seats for a friend, passing notes, playing games like “telephone” where you whisper a message into a friend’s ear and see what happens by the time the message reaches the front of the bus?

I joined my son’s 4th grade class a while back on a field trip to our state capital and I can testify that some things haven’t changed - there was seat saving and whispering and all the excited energy that comes with missing an entire day of school when you’re 10 years old.

There was note passing too, only not on loose-leaf paper or scraps of a brown lunch bag like we once used. On this bus, I counted almost 20 handheld gaming devices, quite a few of which were Nintendo DS machines. These machines have a connectivity feature that allows them to connect to others wirelessly. Kids can write notes to each other, draw pictures, chat and play group games.

And that’s exactly what they did during each leg of the 70 minute ride. Even friends who were sitting rows away could challenge each other to a video game and kids were taking turns, passing the machines around - even letting the grown-ups join in the chats and games. Kids crowded around the machines, cheering each other on - trying to figure out who had drawn a smiley face, a tic-tac-toe game, a picture of a badger (it was me!)

Some things haven’t changed. The smell of the vinyl seats and the bumpy bus ride brought back memories of my own school field trips. But the things that have changed - the digital dialogue, the interactivity, the electricity that ran through the bus literally and figuratively - made me wish I was a kid today.

Sharon Miller Cindrich is an author, columnist and mother of two tech-savvy kids. Her work has appeared in magazines and newspapers across the country including The Chicago Tribune, Parents Magazine and FamilyFun Magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Her self-syndicated column Plugged In Parent is published in parenting magazines around the country, and her book E-parenting: Keeping Up With Your Tech-Savvy Kids (Random House 2007) is available on Amazon.com.

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