Reading is, of course, a terrific idea for staying entertained this summer, no matter your age, but what are some other ideas for filling the days when school is out and maybe you want to keep the brain engaged?
A lot of options these days seem to involve screens, but our go-to tech expert says you don’t have to go there.
Omar Gallaga shared what he hears from other parents about their top concerns about kids and technology, along with some recommendations for fun summer options. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Omar Gallaga: I hear a lot that they just can’t keep up with it or can’t keep up what their kids are doing with technology. I mean, kids are carrying iPads to and from school, and they’re starting to use AI.
And so I think parents have a very hard time keeping track of not only what’s happening on their kids’ accounts when they’re at school or when they are at home using this technology, I think it’s more of a matter of keeping their personal information safe, making sure that they’re not being exposed to stuff on social media that could be damaging.
So yeah, I think it’s very tough these days for parents to keep up with it all and to have the proper tools to supervise and to kind of filter some of that out.
Texas Standard: All right, let’s get into your suggestions. What are your top ideas for engaging kids and avoiding too much screen time?
Yeah, I think through the school year, I mean, they’re in front of screens whether you want them to be or not. They’ve got their tablets. They’re going to be exposed to a lot of screen time.
I think in the summer is a nice time to break from that and try other things that maybe are tech-related but not necessarily in front of screens. My kids had Fitbits a few years ago, and they were the real basic ones. They were just basically pedometers.
But Fitbit has a really nice product called the Ace LTE that’s geared toward kids. They have very colorful bands that you can buy and swap them out. And what it does for parents… I think one tool it does really well is you can communicate and track your kid.
It’s got LTE, so it’s actually on the wireless network. So you can actually page your kid, talk to them through the watch. And without… You know, they’re too young to have a cell phone, but you still want to be able to see where they are and communicate with them.
This is kind of a good solution for that. You still kind of get a hold of your kid and see where you are, but not have them carrying a full-blown cell phone with them all the time.
Yeah, no, that’s a big deal, because communication is the thing you hear from parents as like a defense for this, but yeah, a phone opens up a world of other issues.
Yeah.
But what else? There are some fun things too, right?
Oh yeah, one company called KiwiCo. My kids used to do these when they were a little bit younger. They are art and science projects that you order and you can choose how often they send them, so like maybe once every two months.
And they range in age scale, so, you know, they have projects for little kids, they have products for pre-teens, all the way up to teenagers. Really fun projects, really creative stuff that the kids build themselves.
So there are things like a remote control robot snake, a marble roller coaster. Some of the ones my kids did was there was an automated calendar that would just sort of like flip on its own. And there was a Spirograph that one of my daughters did that she loved. They cost about $24 to $40.
Once you build them, you keep them and you can use them forever, as long as they hold up. So these are great projects. You can do a subscription where they send you one every couple months or however often or you can buy them individually.
So that’s a little bit of like getting into the science behind the technology, too. And there’s another, there’s like a board game.
Yeah, there was a board game that I helped kick-start called Robot Turtles that we love. My daughters were really, really little when we bought this, and unfortunately that game is out of print. You can still get it on eBay and in places like that, but I don’t believe it’s still being published.
But there are other games that also teach STEM and programming skills. There’s one called SET, there’s one call RoboRally, Space Alert, Whirling Witchcraft. These also range in ages, but there’s lots of games out there that teach very basic STEM principles under the guise of like a fun board game.
And then there’s always like the sort of robotic moving-around things. And are those things getting better than they were even when I was a kid?
Yeah. And unfortunately, some of the things… Like I was going to suggest drones aimed at kids that are much cheaper than the expensive ones. There’s RC cars. A lot of these have kind of moved toward having an app, you know, controlling them with your phone. So that’s not great. You’re kind of going back to the screens.
But drones are super fun. There’s the DJI Neo Mini Drone. There’s Holy Stone Mini RC drone. And some of these, you actually build yourself. So there’s kits for some RC devices, like little control cars or airplanes, that you would actually build and then use or there’s some that just come out of the box ready to go.
And one more tip, you said that this is good for maybe kids of all ages, especially on the younger end though.
For summer, yeah, I recommend purchasing a bubble machine if you don’t already have one. There are so many different kinds and a lot of them start at like, you know, $10, $20. You will get so much use out of a good bubble machine all summer.
I still have one in my garage from years ago and, you know, they break pretty easily but they’re cheap. So invest in a decent bubble machine and the kids love bubbles and they’re pretty basic and easy to use, usually.
