MySims Sky Heroes: launching by this Sept
 Most of you are familiar with The Sims, the closest thing to a do-it-yourself soap opera videogame.  You may be less familiar with the junior version, My Sims.  It’s a simpler, younger adventure that concentrates on cute Mii like characters.  There have been racing version of My Sims and well as others.
. The newest My Sims addition is called SkyHeroes and it will be available by September.  A better name would be My First Flight Simulator.  Instead of just navigating aimlessly from point to point, your mission is to battle Morcubus and his drone army . They’ve got nefarious plans to take over the skyways!  You earn your wings as your speed and reflexes are put to the test.  Whimsy is pervasive as you can fly everything from a prop plane to a UFO.  Available for Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox and Playstation.
Sky Captain by D3 Publishers, also jumps into the flight training craze with  a  much more structured adventure for young children where they can  pilot anything from a plane to a UFO 40 different tasks from stunt flying to shooting targets.  No killing, no crashing, and simple enough to pilot that even I managed. Sky Captain reports they’ll be available by this sumer.

To make sure that the apps garnered a public life, I, along with Reyne Rice from ToyTrends  gave the following presentation.

get-pr-at-app-camp

More research into what kids watch and how we might tap into their screen time for learning is required, but congrats to Vicky Rideout (who previewed the results at our Kids@Play Summit in Las Vegas.

The Nick Edition follows on the heels of a Disney announcement for a pink or blue encased ASUS netbook that it calls the NetPals Netbook. Both machines are honest-to-goodness entry-level netbooks, ones that any adult on a budget would be happy to own. What makes them kid-friendly are decoration, software, a custom UI, and lots of parental control software

Beneath the green and white Viacom slime on the cover of the PC lurks a Dell Inspiron Mini. A Nick widget (which wasn’t quite ready to be demonstrated) will take junior right to Nickland. There they’ll find feature games of the week, first-run Nick shows, an MP3 and more. WhyVille, a highly respected social networking site that caters to a “thinking” kid, is also featured prominently.

When it comes to speeds and feeds, both Disney/ASUS and Nick/Dell machines have similar specifications: Atom processors, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and a built-in webcam. Both run XP. Both weigh under 3 lbs. Dell adds a Lo-Jack–a sensible addition for parents sending kids into a world where they’d forget their pants if they weren’t wearing them. Dell did not announce pricing, but expect it to be competitive with the Disney NetPal.

According to Dell, Maria Bailey, CEO of BSM Media, helped set the mission. Moms and dads are looking for brands they can trust, access to entertainment and education, and a protected environment.

Dell is going to miss the back to school buying spree, but when it does become available in October you’ll find the Nick Edition at Wal-Mart or on Dell.com.

Undecided whether to be in the SpongeBob/iCarly or Little Mermaid/Hannah Montana camp? Don’t worry–I’m sure it’s a matter of moments before you’ll be able to add a few other kid-themed netbooks to the menu. The injustice of it all may be that your kid gets a netbook before you do.

Goo is back, reincarnated as an iPhone/iTouch app called Making Faces. It’s a hoot. Load in any image and, using your fingers, you can pinch, bulge, spike, twirl, wave, ripple, nudge, smear, and otherwise whack-out your images. Then turn them into a time-lapse movie. The true power of this $2.99 app won’t be fully realized until you can email your creation to friends, but in the meantime you can definitely have a load of fun making faces.

I’ve been scanning the reviews of the new DSi and becoming convinced that the techie crowd doesn’t understand that “something’s happening here.” Most reviews are using words like “evolutionary” and missing the point that when you put a camera, good microphone, and some great software in a portable game machine, it changes the nature of the game. I spoke with Warren Buckleitner, founder of Children’s Technology Review and the director of our Kids@Play Summit program. Warren calls the new DSi a “Digital Sandbox.”

By adding two (yes, two) digital cameras and a sensitive microphone, the DSi heralds another level of creativity and exploration. The two cameras (one faces inward so you can capture photos of yourself and one faces the outside world) come with software that lets you pull, yank, meld, and manipulate images using software special effects lenses. The sound and music tools let you use the DSi as an MP3 player, but, more importantly, lets you sample the sound of voices, birds chirping, and teachers lecturing, and then edit and manipulate them. The DSi, if used well, will unleash fantastic amounts of creativity.
To read more on why Warren thinks the DSi is magic in a kid’s hands, read his DSi impressions.

For a great synopsis of what’s new and different with more emphasis on the technical specs, I’ll point you towards John Davison’s review on WhatTheyPlay.com.

Yesterday, in Washington, DC, and the Senate Building, Parry Aftab held the 9th Annual WiredSafety Summit. The event was hosted by WiredSafety’s Teenangels and Tweenangels—kids from all over the country who’ve taken training classes based on the WiredSafety curriculum.

Corporate sponsors included Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, KidZui, MyYearbook, Facebook, MySpace, and dozens of others. Corporations are particularly interested in working with and promoting WiredSafety kids because kids are the best touchstones for the state of the kids’ Internet. During the Summit, groups of kids tackle issues including gaming, texting, webcams, and social networking, and present their research to the adult audience.

Aftab also uses the Summit to bestow numerous awards for industry, government, and websites. I was honored by receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award for Online Child Protection, as was my colleague, Linda Criddle of Look Both Ways . Other awards went to the FTC for the work it’s done in creating websites that help you protect your privacy. Microsoft received an award for working on safer gaming environments, KidZui received an Internet Safety and Responsibility Award and awards were given to law enforcement programs as well as TV programs like Nickelodeon’s iCarly.

Some of the findings from the kids’ research with their peers included the following:

• Texting while driving is something that’s done quite a bit by teens and needs to be addressed, educating them about the dangers.
• They recommended that privacy policies on websites should be short and clear, and that information they give up on a site to register should not be shared with third parties.
• Password sharing is a common and unsafe behavior that teens and tweens often engage in (85% of elementary school kids share their password with at least one other person).
• There’s a shortage of interesting games for girls.
• Moms are gaming with their kids almost as much as dads.
• A 15-year-old is probably the highest risk age of the tween/teen population.
• When kids engage their parents with their online activities, the kids themselves are safer and more careful.
• Boys post more videos to YouTube than girls do, but both watch them as often.
• Cyberbullying occurs as early as 2nd grade and peaks in 4th grade.
• When kids are targeted by a cyberbully, most kids hide it from their parents (unless they surf together or play online games together).
• Boys tend to be riskier online than girls, by sharing more personal information and meeting offline with people they only know online.

For the youngest digiterai, ages 2-5, LeapFrog showed the Tag Reader Junior and Zippity. Tag Reader Junior is a pre-reader friendly version of LeapFrog’s popular Tag Reader. A magic pen (one chunky enough for the pre-pencil set crowd to grasp) senses information that’s embedded into the invisible grid on pages of tough cardboard picture books. When the pen touches a word, a color, a thing, stuff happens. Of course, pre-readers initially use this as if it were a stamp pad and not a book, but it does make books a delightful exploration. Price: $35

Zippity Learning System

LeapFrog and Disney Playhouse teamed up to create this game that’s a cross between Dance Dance Revolution and Wii Sports for the preschool crowd. Kids dance, jump, and move as they learn preschool skills. The mat is used to run and jump and the baseball bat-looking contraption (called “the bopper”) is used for upper body movements. Games feature Mickey, Darby, Goofy, and other Disney Playhouse favorites. $79

For older kids, Lego’s RC Car combines the love of building with Legos with a love of race cars. After you build your own Lego RC Car you use the radio controller to drive it round the tracks. Crash? Just rebuild your car. $39.99 for a 92-piece kit gives you two different designs.

Lego also announced a new set of Lego building bricks that will tie into a new website from the company. The site, Lego Family Time, will offer building plans each week that kids can follow along with or modify to their liking.

TechnoSource’s Printies Design Studio is an all-in-one craft studio that lets kids create unique stuffed animals using just their PC and printer. First they design their animal using the included software–choosing their favorite features, colors, patterns, and expressions. Then the creation gets printed on the special fabric sheets that can be used with any ink jet printer. Once the printing is done, kids stuff their animals with pillow stuffing, add feet and stickers. Best news is that there’s no sewing or gluing. $19.99 for a kit with six animals

One of the most open-ended play tools comes from Jakks Pacific. The EyeClops Jr. is a full-blown nightvision camera that allows kids to see in the dark. The inventive games you can play in the dark with nightvision goggles are never-ending. But, at $40, parents won’t be spending anything near what real nightvision goggles would cost even though the experience is quite similar.

In the same vein, the EyeClops Mini Projector is a real working mini-sized LCD projector. It projects a VGA quality image. The image can be projected up to 70 feet, and can receive input from all sorts of gadgets: DVDs, game players, PCs, iTouch, and others. When it ships this fall it will cost under $100. A pocket-sized projector for under $100–adults are going to want to buy this one, too.

At $150, the product that left me slightly aghast by its price tag was TechnoSource’s Rubik’s Cube Electronic, but it’s a must for Rubik’s retro lovers. Instead of manually cranking the cube, you swipe your fingers across a row of colors using an iPhone-like swipe. The cube glows to your touch. An accelerometer inside the cube lights the squares and keeps track of which side of the cube you’re working on. Unlike the traditional model, the electronic version features hints for you when you’re lost and it will solve itself when you’re thoroughly disgusted.

These products aren’t on the shelves just yet. You’ll see them start to roll out over the summer and into the fall.

“Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children.”

For a child, today’s play is tomorrow’s work. Whether it’s playing with a toy doctor kit, a tea set, a digital camera and editing software, or inside of a virtual world, the skills they’ll need tomorrow are being honed.

But their skills will only be as good as the tools we give them. According to a recent report from NPD, a higher percentage of kids ages 4-14 are using computers than they are televisions. Fourteen percent of kids in this age group own their own computer. Twenty-eight percent use digital music players. Twenty percent own cellphones.

What they do with these tools is still a great social experiment. The web and consumer electronic devices have provided them with a vast sandbox in which to play and explore. A recent study from the MacArthur Foundation found that social networking is, contrary to many parents’ beliefs, a motivator—a place to practice both social and creative skills. Simulations teach them to play “what if” in the safety of a virtual environment. Educational software is able to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses with a granularity that a teacher in a classroom never could. The tools of youth—IM, chat, Facebook—are finding their way into the workplace. There’s an economic imperative to learn to play digitally.

At the  Kids at Play Summit http://kidsatplaysummit.com we’ve enlisted some of the greatest minds from education, journalism, product and content development, and academic research to paint a picture of why being digital changes everything.

In his book, Playing the Future, Douglas Rushkoff said, “Our kids may be younger than us, but they are also newer. They are the latest model of human being, and are equipped with a whole lot of new features. Looking at the world of children is not looking backwards at our own pasts—it’s looking ahead.”

Welcome to the future. I founded http://kidsatplaysummit.com as a forum to help the high tech industry continue to create and innovate in your respective fields so that kids everywhere can reap the benefits.