Anyone with distant grandparents or family members knows how hard it is to keep connected, especially for young children. It’s tough enough to hold kids’ interest during a face to face conversation, but during a phone call (or even a facetime session), it’s next to impossible. The reason? Kids want to interact and have fun, not just talk.
Adding fun to long distance interactions
That’s why we were excited to learn about Kindoma, a new Palo Alto company that is creating apps to foster playful long distance interaction. “Kindoma provides a structured, fun way to build family engagement,” said Tico Ballagos, Kindoma’s co-founder. “Children using Kindoma’s apps stay connected to distant relatives through reading or drawing- activities that are rewarding for both the child and the adult.”
Reading a book together…even 1000s of miles apart
Kindoma’s Storytime app has a library of over 250 children’s books that allow an adult and child in two different places to to read the same book simultaneously, literally turning the pages and pointing to pictures to ask questions and discover the story together. Check out this video to see Kindoma’s app Storytime in action.
Kindoma also solves some of the challenges that come up when adults try to read a story over Skype or other technology, such as the difficulty of seeing the pages, not having the same book in both locations, etc. With both users looking at the same screen at the same time, Storytime provides a much smoother experience, and allows the adult to ask the kind of questions that help children draw meaning and build literacy skills.
Or try drawing and tick tack toe with someone in another time zone
Drawtime fosters creativity through an app that engages both adult and child in art together, as seen in this demo video.
An idea that started with Sesame Street…and ended up in Palo Alto
The idea for Kindoma first came from a literacy research project between the Sesame Street and Nokia, which created a prototype app that featured Elmo asking questions designed get kids thinking more deeply about what they were reading. Convinced that the protype could have value as a commercial enterprise, Tico and his co-founder Carly Shuler created Kindoma as a start up in 2013 and launched the Storytime app for the ipad.
Elmo was part of Kindoma’s original prototype.
Two years later, the company has raised seed funding, been covered by The New York Times and other media outlets and launched two apps available for Apple IOS- Storytime and Drawtime. A third app called Talktime is in the beta stage. Kindoma has been incubated at Unamesa, nonprofit located in downtown Palo Alto that fosters innovation in education, health care and social services.
Families who struggle with separation crave ideas for connection
According to Tico Ballagos, the need for Kindoma’s apps is huge and growing. “There are so many families that struggle with long-term separation, due to immigration, military service, divorce and more,” he said. “About one third of the children in the United States live away from at least one biological parent, but we believe technology can be a great way to bridge the miles and build family engagement.”
Support Kindoma’s crowd funding effort and give back
Kindoma has kicked off a crowd funding effort on Indigogo that aims to raise $40,000 by January 1st to help fund the development of its apps on Android. The campaign is off to a great start, reaching over 35% of their goal in under a week. For every $5 investment received through Indigogo, the company will donate one month towards a Kindoma Storytime subscription for a family who needs it most, such as those facing hospitalization or separated by military service.
To learn more, visit www.kindoma.com, or Kindoma’s Indigogo site.
