According to a new study, we really don’t have to worry too much about the nearly 1 in 4 children without access to FarmVille at home.

“Our results indicate that computer ownership alone is unlikely to have much of an impact on short-term schooling outcomes for low-income children,” report Robert W. Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson in a new study of a large-scale randomized computer give-away experiment in California. On the one hand, it’s good news that doomsday predictions for computer-less children have been exaggerated. However, giving out computers was one of the easier solutions to closing the poverty educational outcome gap, and now we have to go back to the drawing board.

“We find that even though the experiment had a large effect on computer ownership and
total hours of computer use, there is no evidence of an effect on a host of educational outcomes, including grades, standardized test scores, credits earned, attendance, and disciplinary actions,” explains the new report, contradicting previous evidence that children without Internet had a severe disadvantage on exams.

Based on the (reasonable) fear that lack of computer access was hurting poor students, California gave out computers to 1,123 students in grades 6-10 attending 15 schools across the diverse central California area. Most importantly, the data-savvy administrators randomly selected half the students as participants, so that we wouldn’t have to worry about whether those who took up the offer were unusually motivated.

True to their worries, 49 percent of the children didn’t even know how to download a file from the Internet. Naturally, computer use went up, but so did their access to less-than-educational games. “We find that home computers increase total use of computers for schoolwork, but also increase total use of computers for games, social networking and other entertainment, which might offset each other,” surmise the researchers.

Of course, having computers may have non-educational benefits. Basic computer literacy certainly helps in a knowledge economy. But the real problem is that many poor kids never even get a shot at information technology jobs, and the rich-poor gap is only getting worse. The SAT gap has grown 40 percent and college completion has skyrocketed 50 percent since the 1980s.

This means that the likely culprit is far more insidious: the family and environment. I taught at-risk youth for years and saw first-hand how parents who didn’t prioritize college paralyzed their eager children. In my home, it was expected that I go to graduate school before I even knew what it was.

Children without the same expectations have a severe disadvantage, and no gadget is going to fix it.

[H/T: @markwarschauer]

[Image Credit: San Jose Library]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Parents of preschoolers can finally let go of “iPad guilt” – the term that refers to that terrible feeling you get when you use the iPad as babysitter. Today, a company called Kidaptive is launching one of the most comprehensive feedback systems for parents to date, allowing them to get a hand of their child’s learning and development by simply handing over the iPad and letting their child play.

It’s a shame that despite the wide variety of educational apps out there, too many parents still treat the iPad as a toy, letting kids rot their minds with time-wasting games and goofs, instead of using screen time to learn. But as any kid will tell you, learning is just sooooo boring. That’s why Kidaptive has so much promise – it merges the lean-back experience of watching TV with mini games kids actually think are fun.

The company first launched its “edu-tainment” iPad application called “Leo’s Pad” back in fall 2012. The app was designed by a team that includes CEO P.J. Gunsagar, who also co-founded and served as president of Prana Studios, a 3D visual effects studio with 1,000 employees in L.A. and Mumbai, India; “Chief Learning Officer” Dylan Arena, whose background is in cognitive science, philosophy and statistics, with multiple degrees in all three from Stanford; and Creative Director Dan Danko, who has written for a number of children’s TV shows including “Rugrats,” “Fresh Beat Band,” and PBS’ “Word World.”

The combination of skill sets has paid off. The resulting creation has been a huge hit (well, in our household at least), as well as with over 200,000 parents who have downloaded Leo’s Pad for their children.

Leo’s Pad features the adventures of a young Leonardo da Vinci, his pet dragon, and friends Galileo and Marie, and has children doing puzzles (to build telescopes and rocket ships, e.g.), flying through clouds, identifying colors and shapes, drawing, finding letters in the stars, and much more. The games appear amid high-quality animation that rivals what you would find on TV. Even better, kids don’t seem to realize that they’re learning as they play – as far as they know, they’re just having fun.

Speaking as a parent myself, that’s a combination that’s tougher to find than you might think.

But the iPad babysitter scenario often means that parents don’t know exactly what a child is learning or where they stand. Today, Kidaptive changes that with the debut of what it’s calling “Parent’s Pad,” an in-app, parents-only area that shows their child’s progress in reading comprehension and math skills, as well as in cognitive, emotional and social functions, meaning things like “being patient” or “taking turns,” for example.

In Parent’s Pad, you can see what “appisodes” (as these TV-like apps and games are called) the child has started watching, and what activities they’ve performed so far.

“We took our curriculum framework which is comprehensive – that is to say, it covers everything a child needs to be ready for kindergarten and prepared for learning – and it’s a hierarchy,” explains Arena. ”The structure of the curriculum is that there are high-level categories, and there are children of those categories, all the way down to the dimensions we actually measure,” he says. These learning dimensions are explained and measured in the Parent’s Pad section.

Today Leo’s Pad has released just two of these appisodes that it can measure, but the long-term plan is to release 25 appisodes in total, creating a year’s worth of curriculum with over 80 dimensions of learning. The plan is to have at least 10 more appisodes out this year, with all 25 completed by 2014.

The goal is to not only inform parents of a child’s progress using an easy-to-read, color-coded framework detailing their activities, but also to offer suggestions and tips as to how to help a child in an area where they’re struggling.

For instance, the app might offer a tip to parents whose child doesn’t yet know his or her colors, to begin referring to colors in a specific way when speaking. (e.g. “the chair is blue” instead of “the blue chair,” which research has shown to help a child acquiring color words.)

Longer term, the company might start offering “offline” activities – like a telescope you assemble in real life to accompany the one the child puts together in the app – as an additional revenue stream.

As the child plays the Leo’s Pad apps for longer, their profile becomes more filled out in Kidaptive’s assessment framework, and eventually that sort of thing could be shared with teachers upon the child entering the classroom. Over time, the same framework could be adapted to work with other apps – like those focused on older kids.

Kidaptive isn’t the first company to think of how parents can track a child’s progress in apps. Fingerprint’s “mom-comm” system lets parent and child communicate upon the completion of levels or other achievements in its own “edu-tainment” suite of apps, and other apps like iLearnWith, Stickery, and many more, do something similar.

However, Kidaptive is the most comprehensive system, based on curriculum, which we’ve come across to date. For that reason, it’s enough to assuage a parent’s “iPad guilt”…well, as least temporarily. At some point, you’ll still want to yank that thing from their hands and shout “go play outside.”

But at least the child will have learned something in the meantime.

Kidaptive is seed funded by Menlo Ventures, CrunchFund (disclosure: TechCrunch’s founder Michael Arrington runs CrunchFund), Veddis Ventures, S-Cubed Capital, Krantz Holdings, VKRM Ventures, iCamp, and Prana Holdings, which is also Kidaptive’s animation partner.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

500 Startups today is announcing the next 28 companies to take part in its Accelerator program, unleashing a largely international class of startups who have come to Mountain View to accelerate their startup progress. There are 28 companies in this Accelerator class, and as usual there’s a bunch of diversity there. (And, as has become tradition, the class made a ghetto fabulous music video to accompany the announcement.)

The group is more than 70 percent international, with 20 companies coming from outside the U.S. That’s no big surprise, as about 15 percent of the 500 Startups portfolio in general is made up of companies outside the U.S., but over the last several batches, the accelerator has skewed heavily toward overseas and non-Silicon Valley companies.

This class includes startups from Brazil, Chile, China, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine and Vietnam. With Dropifi (Ghana), as well as Dakwak and Tamatem (both from Jordan), the 500 Startups Accelerator has added its first companies from Africa and the Middle East.

Notably, this batch was the first which was chosen entirely through applications posted to AngelList, so it no doubt includes a few startups that 500 Startups founding partner and Sith Lord Dave McClure probably wouldn’t have heard about otherwise.

The program began mid-April, and 500 Startups expects to have its Demo Days in Mountain View, San Francisco, and New York City sometime in July. In the meantime, enjoy the music video they put together to announce themselves, below. Oh, and here’s the list of startups:

• AppSocially – Make your app’s Viral Loop awesome with an API that lets you track activity and conversion – allowing you to take action using customer data.
• BinPress – We increase adoption of open source in SMBs and enterprises.
• BoxC – We make buying directly from sellers in China as fast and safe as buying from Amazon.
• Credii – We arm businesses with all the intelligence they need to make smart software and service choices.
• Dakwak – Effortless website translation technology.
• Dropifi – An intelligent replacement for mailtos
  and dumb contact forms. It makes customer support more effective, increases lead generation and generates valuable business insights.
• Feast – The online cooking school for the common man. It offers simple cooking guides that teach impressive techniques and recipes with an online community where you can ask questions and get feedback as you cook.
• Floqq – Makes it easy for anyone anywhere to learn the skills they need.
• Flyer – We empower commercial real estate agencies to create beautiful property flyers online.
• Geekatoo – We offer local and onsite tech support at a great value. Customers receive competing bids on tech support needs from verified providers.
• GreenGar – Seamless realtime collaboration on mobile devices. We’re building a platform that enables apps to intuitively connect people together.
• InstaGIS – Geographic information system that allows retail stores to target their audiences.
• KiteReaders – Publishing platform for publishers & authors to create, distribute, and market their children’s picture books for iBooks, Kindle, and Nook.
• Koemei – Algorithmic transcription of videos for search and accessibility, helping education and large enterprises gain value from their video investments.
• Mayvenn – Empowers the 95 percent of African American salons that do not retail products. Our mobile commerce solution eliminates a salons inventory cost and opens a new revenue stream for their business.
• PinMyPet – Social-based software for monitoring and improving the experience between pets and owners. It works with powerful, small and low-cost hardware for realtime health and location detection.
• POPAPP – App to fast sketch app prototypes.
• PriceBaba – PriceBaba is a product (re)search engine that lets you shop in your vicinity.
• Reesio – Turns the real estate transaction process into one beautiful flow for agents, clients, and third parties.
• School Admissions – Making school admissions and education tension-free. Disrupting the process of choosing the right school for your child and parents.
• Seat 14A – A complete and affordable ensemble for the discerning man every week.
• SeMeAntoja – We empower restaurants to accept orders online.
• Sverve – Sverve is a self-service influencer marketing platform for small businesses. We connect small businesses with female social media influencers to promote their products and services on the social web.
• Tamatem – Tamatem is a mobile gaming development studio and publisher focused on creating culturally relevant games for the huge unaddressed Arabic gaming market.
• TRDATA – We are the Bloomberg for emerging markets. We collect accurate real-time market information from remote places from scattered and illiquid markets.
• Tushky – Self-service online platform to monetize free time by offering interesting activities.
• WHILL – Next generation of personal mobility for wheelchair users and the elderly.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’m addicted to Dots. It’s betaworks‘ new game. 389. That’s my high score. No power-ups. I’m pretty proud of it. The game consumes my time. I no longer browse reddit during my “private times”; I play Dots.

Dots is simple. It’s elegant. The game has restored my faith in mobile game development. But more importantly, it’s fucking addicting. I can’t put it down.

Dots a simple game: just connect adjoining dots of the same color to clear them from the board. You have 60 seconds. Clearing dots by making squares is the way to high scores. Use your dots to buy power-ups. That’s it. That’s Dots.

Like Angry Birds and Temple Run before it, Dots demonstrates that a simple game with replay value is the key to a successful mobile game. I always want to play just *one* more game. And since the game only lasts 60 seconds, I’m assured that I won’t waste that much time. I might not best my high score, but I’ll give it another go.

Dots is simple. That’s important. The first time the game loads, the user has to connect two dots to advance to the next screen. Instructions are not presented. Just two dots. After poking the two dots, users will naturally drag a line between them. And from there, they’re hooked.

When the app launched Jordan called Dots the most beautiful mobile game she’d ever seen. I won’t argue with that statement. The game is lovely. The betaworks title is also very popular and downloaded over 1 million times within its first week.

Dots is the epitome of a good game. The barrier to entry is set very low, but yet the replay value is very high. This is the golden formula that few games have achieved.

Pacman and Tetris are classic examples. Both were massive hits because it didn’t take any skill to get hooked. Just gobble up the dots or line up the blocks. It’s that easy with Dots. My 3 year daughter gets a kick out of connecting just a couple of dots. My 6-year-old got 114 his first time.

Even Bejeweled, the hit game turned bloatware, is a great example. How many of us wasted weeks of our lives playing that game on a PDA or a feature phone?

More recently Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds proved that smartphones can be a legitimate platform for casual games. Even now, years after their release, they’re still widely popular titles. Why? Because like Dots they’re easy to play and crazy addictive.

Sadly my love of Dots won’t last. There will come a day where I’ll move it from my home screen to a folder where it will live out its time on my device next to Words With Friends, Letterpress, Angry Birds Star Wars, and Temple Run OZ. That’s just how these things work.

Eventually I’ll grow tired of connecting dots and listening to the game’s satisfying pings. And then, probably a year from now as I mindlessly clear up space on my iPhone, I’ll delete Dots, not even pausing for a second to reminisce about our time together. But right now, I’m living in the moment, hiding in the bathroom, ignoring the needs of my children and the yells from my wife while I try to best my high score. Just one more round.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Co-founder Sean Percival is walking away from his CEO position at the children’s subscription clothing startup Wittlebee after it had trouble raising a Series A. Amidst a tough fundraising climate for ecommerce startups, Sean says he thinks Wittlebee will continue operating but it’s up to the board of directors. No replacement has been selected yet for the renowned content ninja and former Myspace VP.

Percival originally broke into the startup world after starting a website in 2006 and then selling it for $100,000 in 2009. In the meantime he worked at Docstoc and Mahalo before becoming the VP of online marketing at Myspace. He left in July 2011 to get into subscription commerce.

Wittlebee launched out of Los Angeles’ Science incubator in January 2012. It was designed to get parents great deals on kids clothing by sending them monthly packages with eight items. At the time Percival said the main draw of the subscription service was that it packs about $80 worth of clothing in a $40 box. He told us “With Wittlebee we save parents time, money and reduce those ‘mall meltdown’ moments.”

Wittlebee raised a $2.5 million seed round from Google Ventures, Matt Coffin, Crosslink Capital, and Rincon Venture Partners. Sometimes referred to as the “Birchbox for babies”, Wittlebee made its first acquisition of Cottonseed Clothing. Last we had heard, Percival and his co-founder Gabe Harriman were trying to raise a Series A.

That apparently wasn’t so easy even though Wittlebee’s revenue was growing. Percival tells me “While the company has done fairly well, the market conditions for ecommerce funding are not great. So the last few months have been a challenge for both the business and myself. We have been working hard on finding the best go forward plan but time has run out, at least for my involvement.”

As for a new CEO, Percival says, “This is still being worked out so nothing to announce at this time.” I asked if Wittlebee would keep operating and outfitting kids, to which he answered, “I believe so and this is to be determined by the BOD. The company was continuing to show revenue growth this year despite the challenges of being undercapitalized.”

Percival started the company just as he became a father. Now a little older and wiser, he’s looking to the future. What’s his next adventure? “At this time I’m not certain. I’m talking through a few opportunities and might even do something crazy, like start another business.”

The issue for Wittlebee seems to be that while seed funding has become easier to find, the flood of startups that permits is indeed causing a Series A crunch. While engineer-heavy software startups may be able to find a soft landing through an acquisition, ecommerce startups like Wittlebee may have a tougher time. Regardless of what happens, in the age of startup success theater it’s nice to see a founder be so frank about his company’s challenges. Not everyone has to be “killing it” all the time.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A number of startups have been trying their hand at subscription-based children’s books services, or something like a “Netflix for kids’ books,” so to speak. Today, another entry called Zoobean joins the flock, with the debut of its own handpicked catalog which parents can either subscribe to, or choose to just shop online like a standard e-commerce website.

The company was co-founded by Jordan Lloyd Bookey, Google’s head of K-12 Education Outreach, and her husband Felix Brandon Lloyd, who is a former Washington, D.C., Teacher of the Year. Like the founders of similar services in this space, including the recently launched Sproutkin and The Little Book Club, for example, Bookey and Lloyd are also parents.

“About a year ago, when our daughter was born, we were looking for a book for our son that would help him understand what it would mean to be a big brother. And in this particular case – we’re a multi-racial family – we were looking for something that might have kids that more resembled our family,” explains Lloyd.

That challenge proved harder than they thought.

The parents wanted a way to find a recommended book that matched their interests, but one they knew was also quality reading. So they built Zoobean to address this problem.

The site, at launch, has nearly 1,500 books for sale, all of which are parent-recommended, curated by a team of parents, teachers, librarians and others, and which are cataloged more extensively with topics, characters’ backgrounds, recommended ages, keyword tags and more. That way, when a parent is looking for a specific book on a topic, they can click to see all those that address that topic – like “self-esteem,” “anger and frustration,” or “growing up,” for example, as well as find books that match their own family structure and characteristics (e.g. “brother & sister,” “mother & child,” “black,” “Chinese Americans,” etc.)

The site will directly sell five featured items per month centered around a theme, and one of these will be available through an optional subscription. Subscribers pay $14.95 for the featured book of the month, a high-quality, hardcover. However, the majority of the cataloged books on Zoobean are being sold through affiliates like Amazon. Zoobean also offers a weekly reading guide for parents detailing the books in its featured collection along with activities parent and child can do together to learn more about the topic.

Though when the founders were speaking of their site’s uniqueness, their focus was on the curation aspects and the way the books were cataloged in more detail. But one of the more interesting things about this service with respect to its competitors is the diversity its selection reflects. There are books about many different ethnicities and subjects, and even harder-to-find books that cover transgender issues or bullying, for example.

“Any kid, parent or loved one who’s coming to find the right book can find one that the child can see him or herself in,” explains Bookey of the Zoobean collection.

The company has raised $500,000 in a seed round led by Kapor Capital, along with other private angels, friends and family. The plan is to raise another $250,000 on top of that.

Until today, Zoobean was in private, invite-only beta with some 200 testers. Now, it’s opening its doors to all parents or anyone else in the market for kids’ books. Users can sign up or browse the collection here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Marco Rubio is a United States Senator from Florida. Follow him on Twitter @marcorubio.

Today, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation will examine the role of immigrants in America’s innovation economy. More specifically, the committee will look at how our broken immigration system is holding back American innovation and job creation, and how the immigration reform proposal before the Senate can promote a thriving U.S. technology sector that benefits American workers.

While there are a number of broken aspects of our immigration system today – including porous borders, weak workplace enforcement and an inadequate system to track foreign visitors who overstay their visas -
one that also stands out is the way we handle academic talent and highly skilled workers.

Every year, our colleges and universities graduate thousands of foreign students who have been educated in our world-class university system. But instead of putting that talent to work in the American economy, we send them home to places like China and India to compete against us. In other words, in many cases, other nations end up benefitting more from our education system than the United States does.

The Senate immigration reform bill would end this debacle. After educating the world’s brightest and most innovative minds, we will no longer send them home; we will instead staple green cards to their diplomas.

We will also expand the highly skilled H1-B visa program from the current 65,000 to a program with a new floor of 110,000, a ceiling of 180,000, and an additional 25,000 exemptions for persons who graduate from a U.S. university with an advanced degree in science, technology, engineering or math. In order to accomplish these necessary moves to a more merit-based immigration system, we eliminate certain categories of family preferences that have allowed for chain migration and completely eliminate the diversity visa lottery, among other reforms.

These measures, which we hope to improve on as the bill moves through the legislative process, are at the heart of our efforts to modernize our legal immigration system to help meet the needs of our 21st century economy, make it more merit and skill-based than ever, and allow our economy to remain a dynamic global leader. They are also the kinds of reforms that will make immigration reform a net benefit for our economy and our federal budget – the way immigration has always been a net benefit for America.

For example, studies show that 40 percent of American Fortune 500 firms were started by immigrants, as are roughly half of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley. This doesn’t just lead to corner-office, executive-level jobs; these generate jobs across the income spectrum that help Americans rise to the middle class and beyond.

With the reforms being offered, the benefits to our economy and our people will come from the infusion of entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, skilled workers and others driven by the desire to build a better life for themselves and their children. And when our economy needs foreign workers to fill labor shortages, our modernized system will ensure that the future flow of workers is manageable, traceable, fair to American workers, and in line with our economy’s needs.

Let there be no doubt that immigration will always be a powerful source of American strength. While some worry that the immigrants that will most benefit from the Senate’s legislation are mostly poor, with limited education and destined to be government dependents, history has proven something else. It has demonstrated the power of the American free enterprise system to lift people from the circumstances of their birth and into more prosperous and stable lives for themselves and their children. Over two centuries of life in America have demonstrated this to be true.

Of course, there are legitimate questions some have raised about why this is now the Senate’s priority.  During the time I’ve been working on immigration reform legislation, I’ve been asked why we are dealing
with this issue at this time, with some questioning the need of dealing with it at all with so many other pressing concerns like our growing debt, millions of unemployed or underemployed Americans, and the persistent threat of terrorism that recently manifested itself on our soil.

It’s absolutely true that these are the defining issues of our time that, frankly, should have been addressed a long time ago.

But the reality of immigration in America today is that, even if we didn’t have some 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. today, we would still have to fix our broken legal immigration system.

The immigration system we have today is a disaster. It’s de facto amnesty that threatens our security and our sovereignty. But even worse, it’s a job killer.

The immigration proposal being considered by the Senate is not perfect. And I believe we can improve it with the ideas of people like Orrin Hatch who care deeply about fixing the immigration system to work better for American workers.

As the immigration debate continues, it is important that we use today’s hearing and every other avenue we have to fix the broken immigration system we have. In doing so, we can move towards a strong, effective system that will secure the border, encourage job creation for Americans, and ensure America remains a dynamic global economic leader.

[Image: Office of Sen. Marco Rubio]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

ThredUP, the online children’s clothes consignment shop, is today launching into a new vertical with the debut of a store for women’s secondhand clothing. The move, which puts the service up against competitors like Poshmark and Threadflip, follows its expansion into junior clothing announced at the beginning of the year. The women’s site had previously launched into beta in February, allowing customers to send in their clothes to resell, but had not yet opened its doors to shoppers.

At the time, ThredUP said that the decision to launch into beta had to do with the complexities of women’s clothing sizes and other inventory management hurdles, but of course, the store also needed the time to solicit merchandise from customers. As with its efforts in the children’s clothing space, the new women’s store works the same: users request a “clean out” bag, which is shipped for free and can be filled with the unwanted, but good quality, clothing, then returned (postage paid) back to ThredUP. The clothes are checked to see if they meet the company’s standards, photographed, and placed online for sale. Sellers receive somewhere between 10 percent and 40 percent of the resell price, depending on the clothing’s quality.

Though now ThredUP is moving into the women’s vertical, its business model makes it different from the peer-to-peer secondhand marketplaces, like Poshmark, Threadflip, Twice, and others, since users aren’t selling their closet contents directly to each other. This makes it less profitable for sellers, but it also eliminates the hassles involved with selling on your own. In the kids’ clothes space, where parents are often quickly overwhelmed with outgrown clothing and are grateful for anyone to take these items off their hands, ThredUP makes a lot of sense. With women’s clothing, it may be more tricky as those who think their gently used clothes are worth selling, as opposed to donating, are generally hoping to make a little money. And for that reason, they might choose to remain on those peer-to-peer sites, where commissions paid are generally only around 20 percent, allowing them to keep the 80 percent.

As you can see in the chart below, these companies are already solid competitors for ThredUP:

ThredUP has been growing since it refocused its efforts on consigning over clothing swap over a year ago, and now reports 500,000 registered users, 970 percent growth in item sales from February 2012 to March 2013, and 28% month-over-month growth in order sales. Revenue details are not available. However, the company has raised $23 million from investors, most recently via a $14.5 million Series C round last fall, led by new investor Highland Capital Partners, alongside existing investors Trinity Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

The company is now receiving and processing between 8,000 and 10,000 items daily, up from 5,000 in February. Its kids’ clothing store has 150,000 items for sale from around 9,000 brands, and, at launch, the new women’s vertical will feature 30,000 items from some 4,000 brands.

In addition, ThredUP has made a move to address some users’ concerns with sending off clothes for resell, then finding that they’ve nothing to show for it when ThredUP deems the items not meeting its standards for quality. In the past, these were simply donated to charity. But for those interested, a “Return Assurance” option is now available, which allows users to opt in to having clothing returned. This service is available for $9.99, so you would have to have a significantly sized clean out bag to make it worth paying the shipping fees.

The new women’s shop is now open at www.thredup.com/women.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Children are known for how much they love to play make believe, and StoryKid, an app introduced today during the Disrupt Hackathon in New York, takes this and gives it a new twist by offering a series of pictures as visual cues for a child to tell a story based around them. StoryKid is aimed at children aged 2 to 5 who are already talking but may either be too young or just starting to write. Created by two comparative literature PhDs from Columbia University, the idea is that this will, in turn, help bring children into the world of story telling and literature. And as co-founder Tianjiao Yu tells me, it can also be used by parents when they’ve run out of inspiration for their own made-up bedtime stories.

Yu, left, says that she learned to code to create the app, while her co-founder Lu Xiong, right, boned up on design and user experience to work on the visual elements. Their motivation to do this was to take what they’ve been learning out of the ivory towers of higher learning.

“Both of us are interested in the humanities and making them accessible to everyone,” Yu says. “We find creating an app is the perfect way to do this.” StoryKid is one of three ideas that the pair have to make literature more accessible to people. The other two, however, are more about discovery of existing literature rather than creating new things. The two are on the lookout now for a third coder who can help with creating these.

Indeed, even StoryKid, as it was created this weekend in the Hackathon, is still at an early stage of where they would like for it to be. The pictures, she notes, for today’s demo were sourced from visual search engine Niice but they will come from other sources when the actual app launches in about 1.5 months.

And the idea will be to also add in more of the to co-founders’ literary knowledge into the narrative structure. “You learn a lot of theories about how to analyse the elements of a story,” Yu notes. “We want to use them here to help generate stories instead, how to help people figure out relationships between people and places, or the connection between two characters.”

Then they would also like to add recording elements, in audio and video, but also in terms of preserving the pictures, to be presented almost like e-books of their own for retelling a story later. These could also link up with other programs like Evernote, which has developed a whole sideline in helping users keep track of what they have read and seen on the web, “a record for parents to know and remember what their kids have been thinking about.”

And although the app, such as it is now, is aimed at toddlers making up their own stories, you can see, too, how this could also be used for older children who are writing more, to write down their narratives once they have them together.

That sounds like schoolwork disguised as leisurely app time, but Yu emphasizes that the “main idea is to have fun, and to make literature fun.” I for one look forward to introducing things like this to my kids to see what they think.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch