Offline.kids – Screen-free activities for kids
offline.kids
offline.kids
When you click on the 2 year old options, it says "6 Activities for Kids Aged 2" despite there being 19 shown, and the text begins "Nine-year-olds are full of ideas..."
The images are good but kinda off... e.g. for https://offline.kids/activity/water-play-tub/ the kid and tub are floating in a even larger body of water, and for https://offline.kids/activity/fabric-sensory-tunnel/ there is a magical rigid blanket-tunnel.
On AI's struggles with hands: do humans have four or five fingers? Why not both!? https://offline.kids/activity/diy-jigsaw-puzzle/
You missed the puzzle itself, where it’s actually three fingers. Kind of impressive degree of inconsistency, honestly.
I don't understand what the point of this website is. It's disingenuous, shallow, and artificial. If someone wanted to outsource their relationship with their offspring to a text generator, why wouldn't they just go to ChatGPT directly?
I can't imagine there's much overlap between people who want their kids to have less screen-time, but also have no standards for what replaces the screen time.
In "How to Reduce Kids’ Screen Time – Without the Tantrums" [1], half of the expert quotes were misquoted or could not be confirmed.
[0] https://offline.kids/teaching-kids-to-lose-gracefully/ [1] https://offline.kids/how-to-reduce-kids-screen-time-without-...
Some trees and dirt will take you a long way providing thousands of hours of fun. As kids we found these big black horned beetles and started a beetle gladiator arena that kept us preoccupied for months at a time feeding and training our biggest beetles. Kids are very creative if you let them be.
We have so many outdoor toys from footballs and outdoor table tennis tables, to outdoor chalk, sand pits and so on and so forth.
Yet most of the time the boys just want water fights and the girls just want to do cartwheels.
Structured play is definitely important. But unstructured play even more so. It’s amazing what kids can find to entertain themselves when they’re left alone.
We need Klutz to come back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klutz_Press
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"Within the last few weeks, Mark and I have built and launched Offline.Kids.
It’s a website to help parents reconnect with their kids and for kids to reconnect with the world around them.
Offline.Kids is directory of screen-free activities for all ages. Each activity is categorised so that parents can find appropriate activities for their situation.
For example, you can find:
quick, clean activities for a 6 year olds outdoor kids activities that take 1-2 hours low energy indoor crafts We built the site off the back of our new directory landing page plugin (catchy name still in progress!). It instantly creates thousands of SEO friendly landing pages for the activities. It’s early days, but Google is successfully indexing the pages and we’ll see how the rankings change over time.
So, if you’re looking for screen-free activities for your kids, check out the website, and share with anyone you think might find it useful!"
* https://highrise.digital/blog/building-offline-kids-a-direct...
The site was built with WordPress using a tool that we've developed. It's been populated by me, using AI to help come up with activity ideas and the activity content. You should see the suggestions, content and images that don't make it through!
Ideally, this would all be community generated and made by humans, but I'm doing this on my own and I don't have the experience of all the activities. Using Ai was a way to get lots of activities on there quickly, to try to test the concept. I agree that in some cases the quality isn't up to scratch, and I appreciate some of the feedback, which I'll do my best to fix.
This is a personal project of mine, scratching my own itch as a parent who needs inspiration for what to do. I thought that it might be useful for others too.
Did anyone even review these AI generated posts before publishing? It's one thing to publish something you didn't write, but it's another thing to publish something you didn't even bother to read:
This activity for ages 3 to 10:
> Instructions
> 1. Clear a safe space in your home
> 2. Set up crawling sections under chairs
> 3. Create jumping stations with pillows
> 4. Make balance beams with rope
> 5. Design tunnels with boxes
First, you should not be leaving children unattended around string or rope (the materials listed here). It's negligent to have that absent from the safety tips, and it's concerning that knowledge is obscure enough that the text generator wouldn't provide a bullet point with that advice.
But also, how many people have a place where they can "Make balance beams with rope"? What low-to-the-floor fixtures do people commonly have with the sheer strength to make a tightrope for children to walk across?
It matters because it's a very strong signal of quality.
The generated posts don't meet this bare minimum. For example, some posts have activities for toddlers involving string or rope, but do not mention the non-obvious strangulation risks. This website should not have been published in this state.
It's like reading other people's chat gpt conversations, not very interesting or useful.
The MySpace era internet where anyone can create a page is back and I'm here for it
With that said, I really like this site and the approach!
The point of accessibility isn't an equivalent experience, which is trivially impossible in any case. The point is to make the material as useful, wherein possible. Especially when everything in the UI costs its user the time of its verbal description, "as useful" very often means ensuring the irrelevant is left out.
There is a very strong ai-vibe, but to find proof in the pictures is hard on most of them (not the pizza one, that one looks awful).
On the other hand, I have yet to take on a client this year, and so my perspective on AI developments at the IC level is mildly idiosyncratic; I know a grain of salt is required, but not how large a one, and my own experiments reveal a radically different set of capabilities and drawbacks than the technology's manic or epistaxic boosters like to describe.
Judging by what I'm seeing lately here and elsewhere, the workaday tech industry world must be developing into a genuinely horrifying grind, and I'm glad to be out of it.
It's not. At least for images, it's very easy to tell. OpenAI watermark all their generated images with C2PA.
"Wait, wait, Steven...there is an app I can download that will let me track your stone skipping attempts to ensure you are trending toward an optimal stone choice, angle of attack, and release velocity..."
There are plenty of examples where a screen provides a better and more enriching/edifying experience than dead trees, etc
> Discover simple, screen-free activities
The implication that screens are bad is obvious to normal people.
The evidence is less clear: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9d0l40v551o
> expressing contempt or disapproval.
Exactly what I thought. "Screen-free" is clearly implying disapproval of screen time. What do you think pejorative means?
This is entirely an assumption on your part. Just because parents are looking for screen-free activities doesn't mean they're anti-screen. They're two totally different things. Most parents want to balance screen time with screen-free time. This doesn't imply anything. When you see a gluten-free option on a menu, do you feel so attacked? While some people may be so gluten-free that they impose their preachy anti-bread beliefs on others, most folks don't and are either looking to avoid wheat or have an allergy.
The fact that they're highlighting the screen-free nature of these activities is what makes it perjorative. Otherwise they would just be "activities for kids". This sort of thing:
https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/kids-activities/
> When you see a gluten-free option on a menu, do you feel so attacked?
No, because some people genuinely can't tolerate gluten.
Putting "screen-free" in there serves zero purpose except to guilt people who let their kids watch videos occasionally into thinking they're doing something wrong.
It's obviously not a good idea to let your kids watch TV all day. Nobody thinks that. But you don't need to feel guilty about letting them watch Saturday morning cartoons or whatever. That's my issue with this "screen-free" guilt trip.
Is this from his biography or something? I haven't read it. But the iPad came out in 2010 and Jobs passed away in 2011. I'm not sure how the timeline works there.
>“So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
So I think there is sense to use "screens" in the pejorative sense. They are quite irritiating.
It's quite frankly ridiculous that people who associate with "hackers" want to isolate their children socially and technologically until some magical time that their mind is ready for controversy. As if the generations most capable of "hacking" weren't doing things far beyond their parent's understanding. Half the "hackers" here wouldn't be a fraction as successful if the censorship and restricted access they wanted were present when they were kids. Ladder pullers are some of the worst people in society.
Technically it's only your word that your children are fine. Who's to say? Not really a datapoint in that regard.
Strict age calibration (matching phrasing and examples to each developmental level)
Concrete analogies (“volcanoes are like shaken soda bottles”) and kitchen-table experiments you can actually do