Yeah it is true. I am more or less modelling the interactions my kid has with other kids and the social relationships I have with her friends parents. She doesn't go to anyone's house who's parents I don't know. Obviously that will change as she gets older.
So for now, the social dynamic in the app is for parents to connect first. Once connected, their kids can choose to connect (facebook messenger kids uses this same process I think).
When I talk to less tech-savvy parents in my community, I think many feel quite helpless and unsure how to navigate a lot of this. Consuming youtube kids videos on an iPad is one option, or outlawing screentime entirely is another. Kids want real stuff that they are in control of. I want to build age appropriate versions of this kind of stuff... with the appropriate guards and oversight in place, keeping parents in the drivers seat.
When my daughter was around 2 years old she would sit on my lap and type letters on my laptop into Emacs. I would change the color of the text and she would type more. I figured there was a simple webapp here, so built various things for her to play with over the next couple years. One let her type words and then fire off a ddg safe image search and return cartoon images in response. She would copy words out of her books to get pictures of dogs and trees and silly things.
We live far away from family, and the idea of having a way for her to communicate with cousins and grandparents became the focus. As well as other kids in town. So I thought about a social version of the experiments I'd been playing with.
I'm inspired by Seymour Papert's thinking, about kids using technology to learn math and logic... living in "mathland" so to speak. But I'm also thinking about positive alternatives to the default social network interactions that are available for kids and families now.
Long term I would love to build a platform that lets kids explore technology and build collaborative spaces.
Keeping parents in the loop of what is going on is important, but balancing that correctly can be challenging, I don't want a "big mother is watching" kind of app, but I think its appropriate for parents to know what their kids are doing and looking at and talking to, especially at primary school age (my daughter is currently 8). What is needed and appropriate always changes.
Thanks for your interest. I will send you a link if you want to have a look and try out something that is still rough around the edges. I'm working out some login/connection flow issues and am not ready to publicly share quite yet.
I am working on a site that allows kids to chat and play online with other kids. To connect, kids must have their parents sign up and connect with the parents of their friends. Kids can chat with their parents and family as well as other kids in their network. Messages can be monitored by parents. There are also other activities like a bot workshop where simple llm bots can be "programmed" by creating system prompts (kids create video game helper bots, ice cream shop bots, adventure/dungeons and dragons style bots, etc). There is a sticker book (cartoon image search), and a quiz creator. Many other things are planned!
The guiding principles are to create a fun, positive, safe space for kids and families to socialize and interact as well as empower kids to explore and understand technology as a creative tool and not just as something to consume content.
100% agree with this. I grew up on a TRS-80 and so much wanted to share my nostalgia, or a some modern form of it with my daughter. Turns out using Scratch gives her the same core excitement, empowerment and wonder I experienced typing out games in BASIC but in an environment that allows so much more with so much less toil. That feeling of being able to create things, to get a machine to do what you want to do is captured so well. To top it of there is a community of creators and people sharing tutorials. The source code to every project made and shared by others is just a click away... the learning opportunities are endless. I am so grateful for this platform!
I recall in an interview Peterson saying their hiring process to look for "insecure overachievers", maybe they have a way of screening for that? I never really understood what that looked like in practice.
I think the intended audience of this ad is people who haven't heard of or use Slack but are interested in this new thing Microsoft is doing with the hope of poaching some users. It's not actually intended to convince Microsoft of anything, obviously.
Any plans for creating notes with cloze deletions? I have been looking for a lightweight implementation of an incremental reading system as described at http://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm. Part of the system includes converting what you have read into question/answer material.
This is great, nice work, I have been looking for a lightweight browser based alternative to anki.
After showing the back of a card when practicing, I find myself wanting wanting to see the front of the card at the same time. Either that, or be able to flip it back and forth.
Any plans to add an ability to batch import from a .txt or csv file?