Dotsy App: Encourage your kids to learn about money in a fun and rewarding way

Dotsy is a fun app being developed by one of our close friends Ezra Keddell that uses chores and an investing game to teach your kids how to manage their money through real life experience. Basically Dotsy transforms every day chores into a money game for kids.



There are other apps out there that allow parents to set kids chores, but none that extend the teaching to managing personal investment and finance.  This is where Dotsy is unique with its ability to let kids make virtual term investment and stock trades linked to real world metrics and data, while to them it seems just like a fun game.

Here's how it works:

Set your kids up with their own profile and how much they will earn per chore.



Add a task for them to complete, how many dots they will get for doing the task and the day(s) and times it occurs on.

Get an overview of who is doing what tasks and on what day here.

See what tasks each child has to complete and how many dots they have earned.

See at a glance how many dots kids have earned on the Dashboard.

Dotsy is an app that works on your mobile phone or tablet (android, iphone, and windows), and allows your kids to earn ‘dots’ by completing everyday household chores that you set through the parent panel. Once they’ve started earning and build up a balance, that’s where the fun begins.

There’s two things that they can do with the dots they’ve earned.

1. Earn time - this is the equivalent of a term investment for us adults. It teaches them to delay gratification, and that by being patient and putting away some savings they can increase the value of their dots.
2. Dot X game - within the app is a game based on 8 characters that mirror some of the world's major stock markets. There’s Nikki, Footsy, Kiwi, Ozzy, Seng, Dow, Naz and Indy. Kids can then use their dots to invest with the characters, and start to learn about real markets and how they work.

This gives them the opportunity and responsibility to start figuring out what sort of financial strategy works for them. And hopefully learn a few hard lessons along the way that will set them in good stead for when they start having to manage their day to day finances on their own.

  

To get the app created and funded, Ezra is using Kickstarter. The way Kickstarter works is you raise the funding you need by getting pledges which convert into a reward (in this case a lifetime licence to use the product) once the app is complete.

If this sounds like something you'd like to see developed, click here to make a $5 pledge which will give you lifetime access to Dotsy once it's been developed. You have nothing to lose as if the total amount required for the project isn't achieved, you won't be charged a cent.

To pledge your support for Dotsy visit the Kickstarter page here.

A great way to get behind Kiwi ingenuity and entrepreneurship don't you think?!

Review: LEGO City Fire Truck: Be the Hero who Saves the World

Being asked to do a LEGO review doesn't come much better than this, when for one son, the joy of building anything with LEGO is pretty strong right now, and for the other 'all-things-fire' mad son, playing 'fire man' is something that happens on an almost daily basis around here.

Give a boy a challenge and he'll go for it. Noah really engaged with building this fire truck set, and it has a level of intricate detail that makes the difference when it comes to engaging in real-life playtime. The fully extendable and rotatable ladder for one, and the mod cons which the firemen are armed with - like a full breathing apparatus and the jaws of life for another.

You'll have to excuse the black eye and yellow bruises in these pics though - earlier in the week Noah had a run-in with the very same coffee table that he built the LEGO on, as he tripped over coming in from outside and gave the coffee table a good old bash with his forehead!

This LEGO Fire Truck set is part of the 2013 LEGO City series.

Put out the biggest blazes with the amazing LEGO® City Fire Truck!

Get to your action stations! There's a fire in LEGO® City and the firefighters need to rush to the scene in their amazing Fire Truck! Connect the hose, extend the ladder and suit up in firefighting gear. Then it's time to grab an axe, climb the ladder and extinguish that fire! Includes 2 firefighter minifigures with assorted accessories.

Age: 5-12 years.

RRP: $ 39.99

              

Disclaimer: we received a LEGO City Fire Truck set in exchange for this review. All content and opinions (other than the product description) expressed within the post are my own.

Polar Bear Bingo {Games for kids this Christmas}

Polar Bear Bingo is a great game for kids who can recognise and sound out letters to make word combinations, so is perfect for kids in years 1-2 at school, and can be played by 2-4 players.

The game is simple but straight forward. Each player has a 2-sided bingo board and you choose before starting the game whether to all play on side 1 or side 2 (harder).

Then choose which side of the spinner you want to play Level 1 or 2 (harder).

Quite often when we play, we play one 'easy' game and then a 'harder' game. With both the spinner and the boards having two sides it means you can mix it up really well for 4 different combinations of games.

Spin the spinner and whichever letter (or combination) comes up, you match with a word 'ending' on your board. In this example, the spinner is on 'sh' so on my board, I could put a token on 'show' 'shin' or 'shop'.

On the next turn, the spinner landed on 'sl' so I could now choose to put my token on 'slat' 'slop' 'slay' or 'slog'.

The goal is to get 3 tokens in a row (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) to win the game!

We got this through a Scholastic Book Club Order at school just before Christmas last year and it was a great stocking filler!

Yahtzee Junior {Games for kids this Christmas}

One game that is a sure winner at our place is Yahtzee Junior (Toy Story 3 edition). We were given this for Noah's 4th birthday and it's been regularly played ever since.

It's a great way to teach kids both to count and match sets, so there's core math concepts involved which is always useful.

Here's the lowdown:

The game is for 2-4 players and for over 4 years, although Mylo is more than capable of playing it now at age 3.

How to play:
Each player takes a turn to shake and roll the 5 dice.

Whichever toy you roll the most of you would keep to one side and then have 2 further turns to try and roll more of the same toy.

Note: Woody on  is like a wild card so he counts towards whatever toy are you trying to get. In the example above, this would give you 4 Hammies.

Note: If you roll Lotso Bear (the baddie) you have to put him aside and can't re-roll this particular dice on this turn.

Once you've had your 3 rolls, you count up your score and place your token on the board.

Play continues till each player has played their five turns and scored against each individual toy. If you get a score the same as another player against one toy (say if you got 4 Hammies and there was already a token there), you have to go to the next highest score, i.e. on number 3 Hammy.

At the end of the five turns, you then tally up the tokens on the board and the highest score wins.

A quick and easy game that can be played in about 10-20 minutes depending on how many players you have, so it's great for those little people who have limited concentration spans at preschool age!

Go Bananas {Games for kids this Christmas}

I'm taking a wee leaf out of Miriam's blog with some of the great game reviews she's shared with us recently, I thought I might add a few of our favourites into the mix, thinking it could spark some Christmas gift ideas for a few of you out there.

This is a great game for kids who can recognise numbers and colours, it's a little bit of a mash-up of Snap and Uno all rolled into one.

The game is for 2-5 players and does say age 6+ but I've been playing it with Mylo (age 3) and he already gets it!

Go Bananas
The game is made up of 3 potential combinations of  'Snap' to win cards off the other players.

Go Bananas
When you spot a red monkey card and a blue monkey card showing the same number of monkeys on top of two different piles, say "Go Bananas!" and slap the piles. The winner collects both piles of cards and puts them at the bottom of their own pile.

Gotcha Gator
If a Gotcha Gator card appears at the same time as either a red or blue monkey of the same number, slap both piles and yell "Gotcha Gator" and collect both piles of cards and add to your pile. The Wild Gotcha Gator card takes any monkey card, regardless of colour.

Splat!
This is when you match a rotten banana with a fresh banana. Slap the piles and yell "Splat!". These two piles of cards are put aside (out of play) and collect one card from every player's pile.

If you become overexcited and slap a pile by mistake or forget to say the right words when you slap, you lose a card., placing it face up under one of the playing piles of face-up cards in the middle area.

Winning the game
If you lose all your cards, you're out of the game. Whoever ends up with all the cards wins.

Go Bananas and have a great time!

Review: LEGO Creationary

What do you get when you cross a toy system loved by millions around the world with one of the best loved party games ever?

Mega fun for all the family, that's what!!

We received this game on Friday to review, which turned out to be perfect timing on what has been one of the wildest, wettest weekends in Wellington in a long while.

And it was a great excuse for some quiet family time sitting down around the table together, in-between a weekend that was otherwise full of birthday parties and sugar highs.

We'd no sooner gotten up on Saturday morning than Noah was standing in front of us with the box in his hands saying "Can we play now? Mum, Dad? Can we? Can we?" which is always a good sign!

It's a very easy game to get your head around, think Pictionary crossed with LEGO and you can't go far wrong. And with three difficulty levels to choose from (although we never made it past basic bearing in mind we were playing with a six year old and a three year old), you can make it as easy or difficult as you want.

The only difficulty was prising the creations back off Mylo who was keen to play with each one after it was made, which was fine until we suddenly needed a part of that creation for the next one. There was some in-depth negotiation needed to convince him that the next creation would be even better and he might like to play with that instead!

On your turn, roll the dice to determine which category you need to build. Then use as many bricks from the the whole box of LEGO bricks as you want to make your creation.

These are some of the great creations we came up with. Can you guess any of them?

Lighthouse, alarm clock, islands, maze

The game was an instant hit, so much so that they played again without me while I was out on Saturday afternoon, even sending me a little picture text of one of Daddy's creations at one point for me to guess. I guessed BBQ and I was right!

Mark's BBQ

Sunday morning dawned, there was an eager six year old hanging out for Round Three. I must confess I am usually somewhat challenged when greeted by a big box of random LEGO, as I much prefer to build things from a set of instructions. But I was pleasantly surprised when my creative juices got flowing, and I was turning out creations that easily matched the boys' more natural efforts.

Sunday's creations: my cannon, Noah's bumblebee and my double decker bus

We're already looking forward to taking it up to Hamilton to play over the Christmas break with the extended family as there's a few other big kids (aka my grown-up brothers) in the family who we know will enjoy it too.

If you're already thinking ahead to Christmas, you couldn't go wrong with this for a fun gift to entertain the whole family.

Here's the lowdown:

Product name: LEGO®  Creationary

Product description: Roll the LEGO® Dice to select one of four exciting building categories: vehicles, buildings, nature or things. With three levels of difficulty you can show off your building skills, while theothers guess what you are creating. A great game for family and friends to test your imagination, creativity, building and guessing skills to the max.

Contents: • 1 buildable LEGO Dice • 1 LEGO minifigure • 1 LEGO microfigure • 338 LEGO pieces • 96 cards • 1 rule booklet

Age: From 7 years
RRP $69.99

Disclaimer: we received a LEGO Creationary game in exchange for our review. The thoughts and opinions expressed in the post are entirely our own.

Favourite iPhone apps for the kiddos

I love finding new and fun apps for the kids to play on the iPhone and iPod. Here are a few of our favourites right now:

Create A Car

 

This is probably my favourite kids app right now! Basically you build a car from bottom up, first choosing a frame, adding wheels, and all sorts of accessories. At the end you get to turn the key on and see your creation in action. I love that every creation is unique. It's even easy enough for Mylo at 2 and a half to master.

$1.29 on iTunes.

Lego Minifigures

This is a fun slot machine type game where you slide the screen to get a head, arms and legs. When you match all 3, you collect that mini figure. It's funny seeing some of the mismatched figures that come up while you're playing though.

Free to download in iTunes.

The Lorax Marshmallow Munch
This is a bit like Angry Birds but much more fun for the littlies as you get to rescue the marshmallows for the cute little Bar-ba-loots.

Free to download in iTunes.

My Very First App (by Eric Carle)

This is a great game for preschoolers learning colours and the basics of the Memory matching game. It has the added bonus of the beautiful illustrations from Eric Carle.

$2.59 in iTunes.

Monkey Preschool Lunchbox

This is definitely one of Mylo's favourites to play. It is at the perfect level for him to work on his recognition of words, colours, jigsaws and matching, collecting stickers along the way for right answers. If you tune out the slightly annoying but catchy background music, you can let them have a lot of fun with this!

$1.29 to download in iTunes.

Word Wagon

This is a great app for kids learning to read, write and spell. As the mouse jumps over words, the letters appear for you to spell. In the harder levels, there are longer words and no clues for where to put the letters. A great app for Noah's age (five).

$2.59 in iTunes.

HippopoMath

A great app for making maths learning fun. Matching the pictures to the numbers is level 1, and the harder levels go onto addition and multiplication. 

$0.99 to download in iTunes.

iWriteWords

A great introduction to writing letters in the right order with some fun pictures and games. You help Mr Crab collect the numbered balls by dragging him with your fingers, and drawing the letter at the same time. Once all the letters are drawn properly, a cute drawing appears. 

Free to download in iTunes.

Waterslide Extreme

This is a bit of fun for both young and old, trying to slide down the waterslide picking up as many points as possible, while avoiding the crabs or falling off the side of the slide. 

Free to download in iTunes.

Bubble Snap

You know how addictive bubble wrap is to pop, right? Right?! And now you can pop away to your heart's content on this free app. You can even choose which size bubbles you want to pop! Rather satisfying I must say.

Free to download in iTunes.

Oobie's Space Adventure

This cutie-patootie game is our latest craze. Watch as Oobie blasts off past planets, stars, comets, asteroids and the moon, all of which you can interact with on each screen.

And I'd love you to share any of your tried and tested apps that keep your kids entertained!