Tag Archives: apps

I must confess, I’d never given much thought to the origin of sandboxes. I played in them, my kids play in them, and so I just assumed that children have been building crumbling castles and holes to China since time immemorial. After reading Jordan Shapiro’s The New Childhood: Raising Kids To Thrive in a Connected World, I now have a newfound appreciation for the history and social impact of the playground mainstay. Originally called sand-piles, sandboxes debuted in German public…

In Jackson, Mississippi, researchers visited a family of seven (including a niece and nephew), headed by a stay-at-home mom in her 20s. During the visit, the children sat around the mom as she described their latest learning activities, including 1-on-1 homework time and making “slime.” One activity—planting a seed in the yard in front of their apartment building—garnered a lot of excitement. Here’s how the mom described her family’s experience. “[My son] wanted to know, ‘How did that tree get…

In May, Maayan Eldar and Ashley Mannetta discussed Me: A Kid’s Diary by Tinybop at the International Communication Association Conference in Prague. The app encourages empathy and self-reflection by inviting children to respond to a series of questions about themselves and their lives with drawings, photos, texts, or recordings. We invited them to tell us more how user-testing influences the design of an app, and what the data they have begun to analyze reveals.   Last year, Tinybop launched an app…

If you were born after 1990, are the parent or grandparent of someone born after 1990, or a children’s media producer of any age, Ready To Learn (RTL) has probably touched your life. Launched in 1994, RTL is a U.S. Department of Education-funded initiative that provides about $25 million annually for the creation of educational media (TV, computer games, apps, and more) designed to promote school readiness. RTL funding has gone to the production of legacy media properties that existed…

This partial transcript of the App Fairy podcast has been edited for length and clarity. Please listen to the full episode here, and visit appfairy.org for more information about One Globe Kids. Carissa Christner: Welcome to the App Fairy podcast, where I, Carissa Christner, the App Fairy, introduce you to some of my very favorite app developers. This is our first episode, so I wanted to tell you a little bit about why I decided to create this podcast. I’m…

In this special episode of the App Fairy Podcast, we feature part of an interview done by Kabir Seth of the podcast Diversity Sauce about a year ago (back then, his podcast was called “Diversity in Apps”).  Diversity Sauce is a project of the Kids Media and Diversity Project, which is also supported by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, so I was thrilled to have this chance to promote their show on the App Fairy.  Since that interview happened awhile ago, I followed up with a few questions of my…

What if there was a better way to introduce math to young kids? For a parent, one of the first math concepts they teach their child is to count to 10. In this exercise, repetition is the name of the game: “Let’s count to 10!…Good! Now, let’s do it again!” While rote learning of the first 10 numbers is important, it is not sufficient for a child to grasp the deeper meaning behind these numbers, and why they are important to…

Book publisher and app developer Nosy Crow has the best fairytale apps on the market today. Though many app developers lean heavily on the fairytale stories because they are in the public domain and therefore free to use, Nosy Crow is truly innovative in their use of mobile device capabilities and they truly use those special features to move the story forward, not just distract with bells and whistles. Tune in to episode #4 of the App Fairy Podcast to…

Episode two of the App Fairy podcast features an interview with app maker Wolfgang Schmitz of the app company Ahoiii. The Ahoiii apps feature an endearing sailor in blue and white stripes named Fiete. I first encountered Fiete in Ahoiii’s advent-calendar-esque Fiete Christmas app when I bought it for my family, and was soon charmed by the its high quality and whimsical artwork. I was delighted to discover that there was a whole series of apps about this little sailor, covering early learner subjects like math,…

Everyone knows that books have authors and artwork is made by artists, but have you ever stopped to think about the people working behind the scenes to create some of the best children’s apps? Allow me to introduce you to some of today’s cutting edge media creators in my new podcast, App Fairy ! For the past several years, I’ve been using apps in my library programs and during that time, I’ve had many opportunities to e-mail questions to various app developers. I’ve discovered that, unlike…