Need a last minute gift for the child in your life? Want something other than the standard Star Wars, Lego and princess fare? Built In NYC has taken a look at some of the local startups with great educational and creative tech gifts for children this year.
Littlebits is for your favorite little (or big) maker. The kits contain components that easily snap together for children to build their own electronic creations. These include wheels, colorful plastic pieces, circuit boards — no soldering, wiring or programming required. For beginners, kits come with instructions for simple projects, but there’s no limit to what can be created. Littlebits is running a competition for the best Star Wars related invention which is open until December 19.
Brooklyn-based Tinybop creates educational and fun, interactive iOS apps for kids with drawings and graphics created by artists around the globe. The Human Body app lets kids explore and see how our internal systems work. Kids can feed the body and see how it reacts with burps, barfs and farts or use the device camera to see how the eye reacts to bright lights. Other fun games allow kids to make monsters and robots. The ‘Everything Machine’ uses basic visual programming techniques to interact with the device camera, mic and gyroscope to build inventions like a yellow dinosaur detector or walkie talkies.
Tiggly makes physical toys that kids use to interact with apps on an iPad, Android or Amazon tablet. The toys, which are letters, numbers and shapes have silicone touch points so device screens react to them like finger touches. Tiggly packages are available for words, math or shapes for kids ages two to eight.
These little toys allow parents who are away from their children to send audio messages to their kids. Record a message in the Toymail app from wherever you are and the colorful animal themed speakers will deliver that message either in your voice or through a funny filtered toy voice. Kids can reply to messages with their own audio which is sent to your phone. Toymailer can also send daily scripted messages for you to keep the toy active if you forget to send a message.
This one might be more for the protective parents than the child themselves. Filip produces a smartwatch for kids. The watch can make and receive calls from five pre-set contacts, receive text messages, tell the time and keep tabs on the wearer’s location. There’s also an emergency button which the child can push which automatically calls the parent, updates location and records background noises. How you convince the child only to push it in an emergency is anyone’s guess.
