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Short People Unite! The First "OS" for Kids |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Smart Design
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Wednesday, 06 May 2009 |
Through a complicated set of circumstances -- involving off-track betting, Interpol, and a briefcase full of Krugerrands -- I recently agreed to babysit my five-year-old nephew Farnsworth for a week. (Don’t ask -- family name). He’s already wrecked several ongoing experiments here at Dyscern World HQ Labs, and somehow managed to leave a juice box in the hermetically sealed nanocluster chamber.
 Anyway, in an effort to keep him occupied, I went online and found this
interesting little item. It’s a new computer “operating system” built
just for kids, called Kido’z. As you might suspect, the system is
designed to give parents maximum control over content. In fact, what
you actually wind up with is basically an intranet populated by content
OK’d by yourself or, if you choose, other parents on the Kido’z
network. The system provides lots of kid-friendly games and videos as
well, via various partnerships.
Navigation is colorful and intuitive enough, in a kids’ sort of way,
that li’l surfers don’t even have to read or write to click around. If
they are reading, then you can set preferences in 17 different
languages.
It’s really a quite promising idea overall. Predictably, however,
Farnsworth cracked the parental controls in about a minute and a half.
Last I checked, he was watching pirated Ninja Turtle movies and had
somehow caused a massive power grid failure in northern Ontario. The
kids today. What are you going to do?
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