Dear GeekMom Readers,
I would like to cordially invite your children and your fine self to the world's biggest magic party this December. It's all free and it's all good.
Let me show you a magic trick. I'll just need your attention for less than a minute.
TADA. Like all theme parks, we like to show off our attractions first. That one is from our little, free iPhone app. There's a website to go with it that needs a bigger screen.
Now comes the obligatory warning about equipment safety and keeping your elbows in.
Being a mother and a geek, I'm sure you've had some minor worries about how safe and good all this new stuff is. Experts tell us to keep screen time down for young kids, and we occasionally hear about nasty incidences of cyberbullying and sexting on the rise among teens. As more wholesome alternatives, there're plenty of tech gadgets and virtual worlds for our children, with penguins and mushy monsters and other kinz and dollz all around. Sometimes though, I'm sure we just wish our kids would put the screens down and play outside. My collaborators and I at Being Prudence, parents just like you, totally agree. We're geeks, but parents too.
We're also trying to keep up with the pace of it all. Probably you're on Facebook or you're trying out Twitter. Our young children will never know a world without Google or Youtube - they'll want a Facebook account or an iPhone because their older siblings or friends have one. I mean, everybody has one, right? The world is speeding faster and we're catching up. It's tricky because we're learning while our kids are learning. It's supposed to work better if we're at least one step in front. When we were growing up, our parents knew (to a certain extent) what was going on. They showed us good manners, how to be polite to strangers, how to play with kids in the neighborhood. Today, bringing up our own families, how do we translate all of that to the stuff and people wedged behind a piece of glass?
Don't get me wrong. The people behind Being Prudence are geeks and artists, artisans and magicians with the zeros and ones. We love technology. We can do fun things like our little magic trick. We love making things for our own children with our hands and the bits and bytes, like this:
At the same time, we don't want to lose the handmade quality that made our own childhood special. Screens are great, but it's hard to snuggle up in bed with a chunk of metal, plastic and glass. It's hard to get your hands messy and learn some real life skills - to learn the craft of growing up, imagining a world of possibilities.
Do we really want our kids to learn their role models from a screen? It's getting tricky, isn't it. The LA Times in November reported that Disney, icon of wholesome family entertainment, has stopped making princess movies. Tangled is their last fairy tale for the foreseeable future. The LA Times quotes Dafna Lemish, an expert (their words, not mine) in the role of media in children's lives, saying "By the time they're 5 or 6, they're not interested in being princesses. They're interested in being hot, in being cool." I don't know about you, but I get a bit worked up about that. I don't think my two daughters should concern themselves about being hot or being cool at that age. We need good role models for our children, particularly girls. I'd rather my daughters grow up as geek girls, ready to roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty, than grow up as a princess or worry about being hot or cool at 6.
Clearly we need to do something. So - my collaborators and I at Being Prudence have decided to try an experiment, a different way of doing things. We wanted to see what would happen if we made technology that didn't pretend to have all the answers. We wanted to see what would happen if you and your children could take our website or our iPhone app (all freely given), play with it for a few minutes as a launchpad of stories and then spring back into the real world, invited by us to creatively skip around our steps.
It's a busy time for all of us. But what if you could take 5 to 20 minutes as time allows, use simple stuff like a webpage and an apple, or some paper and an iPhone to play with your children. What if we could help you make laughter and happiness from technology, some magic from thin air?
And what if you could capture a smidgeon of that experience with a photo or a few sentences and share it with other families across the world, creating a cascading waterfall of inspiration and respect - a different way of relating in cyberspace. What if we could create a safe place for your family where every child's contribution was special and featured? What if we could be real families and real children sharing freely, instead of pixels wandering around buying extra tokens to upsize our avatar?
Say hello to Felicity from Thin Air. We cordially invite you to come and play and share. Please help us show our children that mutual respect and collaboration can create magic across the world this December. We hope you'll come. We'll miss you if you don't.
All the best,
- Ian Chia
Founder: Being Prudence
PS: All of them are lofty words. We'd like to put our money where our mouth is. Our iPhone app is in the queue at Apple. We're patiently waiting for our turn like everyone else. If you liked the video of our app's magic trick, come to sendfelicity.com and try our fun ideas while you're there. If you entrust us with your email, we'll let you know as soon as this free app is available on iTunes.
This isn't some cheap link bait. We earnestly believe that we need a new generation of apps that inspires learning with the real world, not just schooling in a chunk of metal and glass. So we're giving you the app for free, and we're also giving away the source code for the augmented reality magic that finds your child's hand drawing on paper. If you're a mom who knows computery geeks and you want hands-on apps for your kids that inspire play and learning, please help us spread the word. Email your friends this article on Geekmom.com. If you're a super geek yourself, an Xcode project will be open sourced at github upon App Store release. We want everyone who's interested in making apps for children to have the opportunity to look at our ideas. We hope that by donating this source code, it will spur other family oriented developers the world over to consider that inspiring children's imaginations is every bit as important as the ones and zeros.
