Hopscotch is an app built by those who want to create things that they themselves wished existed when they were kids. The free beta release of the app teaches kids aged 8-12 the beginnings of simple coding. The iPad app uses bright, fun and highly visual cues to keep interest to foster inheriting programming concepts. Instead of the boring line by line tutorials and creating a “Hello World” type of page, Jocelyn Leavitt and Samantha John (Hopscotch founders) are hoping boys and especially girls will join the forces of programming at a young age with a youthful focused approach to teaching.
Boys seem to gravitate toward coding much more easily then girls possibly because of their devotion to video games, while girls get to play with dolls and fashion essentials. With Hopscotch’s bright and colorful interface the app attracts girls to use their building blocks of learning, without it being overly feminine to turn boys away. The interactive program lets kids drag blocks of code into a scripting area to develop their own projects. The female programming movement has been amazing over the past year at the same time childhood learning of circuits and programming has also been a topic with much news. A movement that we hope continues and possibly one day the number of female programmers is equal to that of their gender counterpart.
Using augmented reality effectively has been buggy, cumbersome and sometimes inefficient – it just seems that very few are capable of implementing it in a useful way. Tokyo Newspaper, also known as Tokyo Shimbun, and Dentsu Tokyo created an app that is simple enough to use with augmented reality that it’s targeted at kids.
In an attempt to engage kids and have them interact with newspapers the smartphone app ‘translates’ articles into child-friendly versions to keep their interest. Utilizing pop-up headlines, cartoon characters and script more effective for children, kids not only digest the commentary but also enjoy it.
Our favorite startup of 2012 was the re-crafting of kids drawings into huggable plush toys. Children love to be creative, draw and imagine all kinds of wonderfully colorful animals, toys and everything in-between. Child’s Own Studio, takes these wonderful creations and for a small fee manually creates stuffed plush toys in resemblance of the artwork. Crayon Creatures has a similar offering, but instead of plush toys they provide 3D printed figurines as sculptures to keep safe.
Materializing the imagination of children isn’t just for your little ones, but we find adults even want to re-live their childhood by sending drawings they saved while growing up as well. Kids make so much artwork filling fridges, living rooms, and workspaces, but with the rise of 3D printing, these pieces can be turned into real-life objects – Crayon Creatures does just that.
Were you part of team Berenstain or Paddington? That’s the decisions that plague children before they become tweenies and are force-fed the Twilight Saga. A team of five has founded a new startup to give kids the chance a new way to dig up and discover millions of book titles at their very own doorstep. Before they get too old and Amos & Boris aren’t “cool” anymore.
Mail A Tale is a monthly subscription of hand-curated children’s books delivered right to your door. For just $19.95 a month you can receive the basic package which includes 1 hardcover or 2 softcover books, or $39.95 for the book box plus that gives you 4 softcover or 2 hardcover books.
littleBits is a constructor kit that helps kids create their own toys. Like Lego building blocks little circuits easily snap together with magnets to make anything that can be imagined – making things come to life that can light up, move, twist, and buzz.
Kids (and adult kids) can become inventors and build prototypes without having to solder, wire or understand the intricacies of programming. Each littleBits component has a function that has been preset, may it be proximity sensing, switching, dimming or light response, the circuits than connect together to perform the invented task.
2012 was a great year for kid’s apps and kid’s educational app technologies. There has been huge growth in the amount of funding companies that produce well-designed applications, specifically for children, and in 2013 that growth is surely to continue. DanoToys has released the best-designed stylus targeted at kids. Kids love to draw and color, the large squishy stylus makes it much easier for kids to use while ensuring that sticky grease covered fingers aren’t being smudged over the iPad’s screen.
There are other children’s based stylus on the market such as the Crayola iMarker and the Nomad Play, but the AppCrayon has been honored with PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Distinction. The Crayola iMarker only works with Crayola based apps, while the Nomad Play is not very practical for kids. The AppCrayon on the other hand is long, brightly designed, very responsive, fits well into a child’s hand and works with over 300,000 apps. AppCrayon is the perfect companion for a child adjusting with creativity and technology.
The My Food My Way project is all about actively engaging kids and emphasizing interactivity. We first shared with you this project when it was incepted back in July, and since then celebrated chef and restaurateur Susur Lee has come aboard in the Toronto Education Worker’s and the Toronto District School Board’s campaign to engage student on the subject of nutrition.
To reach out to students aged 13 – 17, My Food My Way launched a new web app that allows users to become interactive live puppets in the name of healthy eating and to record and share puppet video messages. John Weatherup, President of the Toronto Education Workers says “One of the ways that My Food My Way differs from other student nutritional campaigns is its philosophy to engage first, educate second.” And that’s what the puppet video messages, aptly called Foodagram, exactly does.
Earlier this year we shared with you Instamatch – the hit Instagram matching game that let you play with your own personal memories and the images created by others. But if you were looking for a tangible way to bring Instamatch home, Pinhole Press has introduced “Memory Game” to their catalogue of beautifully simple photo gifts.
You choose your 12 favorite photos (of anything: places, faces, friends, family, pets, etc.) Pinhole then prints the photos on thick cards with beautiful graphic backgrounds. Although not built with Instagram API, Pinhole makes artful pieces come to life as photo gifts. It would be great if someone like Printstagram opened their offering to add such artful and fun creations. Or hopefully Pinhole makes advances in their user experience to add Instagram functionality to their product creation designer.
Although meant for kids, we know everyone will get a kick out of using the Doodle Table Cloth. In Ontario there is a franchise called Jack Astors, they let you draw on your paper covered table while you have dinner with friends. There’s been countless times when dinner talk starts to peter out, but luckily a handy crayon would be near by to draw away until conversation starts back up for our team. Now kids love to do this, but designers, developers and pretty much anyone can bring the opportunity to draw stuff in the dining room home with the Doodle Table Cloth.
We’ve been uncovering a lot of children’s based apps lately around our office because of the sheer enjoyment and inspirational interface development coming about in that genre. It truly is fascinating how developers and those with imaginations are developing ideas to capture the spirit of children in the interactive playground of a tablet. Shilo Shive Suleman, an Indian illustrator, animator and visual artist based out of Banglore created a beautiful animated storybook for the iPad that invigorates children to use their imagination and all five of their senses called Khoya.
