February 8, 2011 - 9:03 pm
Designer Katherine Belsey has created this two story, eight room, totally foldable toy house – complete with a variety of papercraft furnishings. She offers several different ways to buy the templates for the rooms – from single rooms “a la carte” to an entire book with the complete plans for her foldable house. She also has free pop-up card templates on her site in case the two story house seems ambitious.
So, instead of buying another plastic barbie dream house, this is an easy way to make and customize one with your kid.
Printed house
November 29, 2010 - 9:49 pm
With the help of Google’s App Inventor for Android, I have created a really useful and totally bare bones app to help my Kindergarten-aged daughter with her “sight words”. I took the “Primer” words from the Dolch Word List and made this easy app that displayed one randomly after pressing a button. As she progresses, I’ll add the other levels of words until we have the whole list of 220. Of course, I could have just printed out flashcards, but where’s the fun in that?
You have to have Google App Inventor to use it. If you have Google App Inventor, feel free to download the “press” version here and the “shake” version here.
If you aren’t already part of Google App Inventor, you can sign up for it here Google App Inventor.
UPDATE – 12/14/10: I’m happy to report that thanks to my daughter’s rapid progress, I’m planning an update with another – tougher – round of words.
October 17, 2010 - 9:33 pm
That’s a screen shot of my first App. A little thing I’m calling KidsGiggle. Pushing the picture plays a short recording of them laughing. What’s cool is that it took me – a noob with zero programming experience – about fifteen minutes to make.
I made it with Google Lab’s App Inventor - a visually based easy programming language to create custom apps. It’s still in a closed Beta, so you have to apply to get access – I got approved about three weeks after submitting the form. KidsGiggle is a simple variation of their first tutorial, HelloPurr, a program that has a picture of a cat that meows when touched. I just swapped out the cat photo for a kid and the meow recording with my each kid giggling.
It was a fun afternoon project with the kids – recording their giggles and showing them the basics of the program.
App Inventor seems aimed mostly to teachers and its a great way to introduce kids and noobs like me to the elements of programming and how they interact. Some of the modules are quite sophisticated, tapping, for example, into the text-to-speech, accelerometer, and mapping capabilities at the heart of the Droid operating system – and more.
Next up, we’re going to add a “Whoooah. Stop shaking me.” sound that’s triggered when you shake the phone. I know, it sounds awesome and you probably want to buy it and play with it all day. Unfortunately, App Inventor Apps can’t be exported to the Andriod Marketplace – not just yet!
Anyway, I’d recommend tooling around with App Inventor for any parent.
