While we may disagree with one another on a variety of different subjects, there is one thing we can all agree on: children love touchscreens. Their little fingers may not be nimble enough to write their own name, but they can tap, swipe and pinch better than most adults. Of course, there are throngs of people who scoff at the sight of kids with their eyes glued to a tablet or a smartphone. However, these devices can be important developmental tools, portals to educational material, and the source of hours of entertainment. The fact of the matter is that a tablet can be an indispensable… Read more
If your child plays a lot of games on the Nintendo Switch, why not use their game time to do some learning? While there aren’t many strictly educational games on the console, there are some that help promote learning and development of skills in some way. Here are four educational games for Nintendo Switch that your kids can play. Related: 9 of the Best Nintendo Switch Games for Local Multiplayer 1. Nintendo LABO One of the absolute best options for Nintendo Switch educational games, the Nintendo LABO has an added extra on top of the game itself. Each LABO box comes with cardboard kits that… Read more
When I was a kid, I got a wallet-busting $5 a week allowance and I was lucky if there was anything left at the end of the week to put in my piggy bank for a rainy day. Now BusyKid is enabling parents to help their children earn money from chores that can be used to buy stocks, donate to charities, buy gift cards, or trade for cold hard cash.
BusyKid charges a family $12 a year to use their service. It allows parents to choose from a large selection of predetermined chores (or create their own). When kids check in with the app to mark chores as completed, an SMS message will be sent to their parent to approve the payment for that chore.
On Friday/payday, kids can then use their earned allowance to buy fractional shares of real stocks which can increase or decrease in value as the market rises and falls. The child can even sell the stock with their parent’s approval and a $2.99 transaction fee.
If they don’t want to invest their allowance in stocks, they can donate it, exchange for gift cards or get cash.
Parents fund the BusyKid Account by linking to their checking account. The funds are held at a FDIC insured bank and are insured up to a balance of $250,000.
You can learn more about this automated allowance system at busykid.com.
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New from No Starch Press: Coding iPhone Apps for Kids A Playful Introduction to Swift
by Gloria Winquist and Matt McCarthy. This book teaches children and adults to code in Apple’s free beginner-friendly programming language called Swift. This 336-page book full-color book is a fun guide that will explain the building blocks of app programming, from loops to variables, strings, and more.According to No Starch Press founder Bill Pollock
“App development is fun for kids because it’s exciting to make something that hundreds of thousands of people might use. This book will show readers how to make something amazing, and it continues our tradition of making technology more accessible for everyone.”
This book will help you learn how to create a fully functioning iPhone app even if you’ve never programmed before. Coding iPhone Apps for Kids will be available in May from No Starch Press but you can pre-ordered a copy of the book now for $29.95.
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New from No Starch Press: Coding iPhone Apps for Kids A Playful Introduction to Swift