What do you do when you are bored with playing blocks with your baby? You put your baby in your lap and go online to play free, fun games at kiddiesgames.com!
Kiddiesgames are simple, big, colorful and designed specifically for babies, preschoolers and their caregivers. The kiddiesgames.com website encourages caregivers to spend quality time with their baby – that is, physical closeness coupled with “intellectual” stimulation – by playing free games together on the computer.
What baby software is available in the large full-screen format that you need for toddlers that click anywhere and everywhere on the screen? Kiddiesgames’ creator, Emma Rath, was looking for such free websites to share with her small children and couldn’t find any. So she created it.
Babies are attracted to bright, contrasting colors, and also to studying the features of the human face. Thus, kiddiesgames feature big children’s faces and bright, contrasting colors. Babies’ ears are tuned to the frequencies of the higher-pitched children’s voices that are found in the kiddiesgames. When creating the games, the fruits of the latest research into baby development were applied by Emma, who has been in the software industry for 15 years, has a degree in Computing Science, an MBA, but is first and foremost a mother of small children.
Research also shows what we already instinctively knew and practiced – that physically touching and cuddling a baby is incredibly important for her very health, emotional well-being and development. More information on this research can be found in Chapter 5 of the book about baby brain development “What’s Going On In There?” by Lise Eliot, Ph.D. With its jingle “Hop on the lap and tap”, kiddiesgames.com seeks to do its bit to encourage this behavior in caregivers, by providing yet another activity to be shared with small children. “Actually, research shows that young developing brains become more intelligent with more variety of activities,” explains Emma, “so we’d like you to add playing these computer games to your repertoire of activities that you do with your child.”
Instead of being modelled after the usual children’s software or cartoons, the graphic design of the games is inspired by traditional baby and preschooler literature. The games have an “exciting” feel to them (to a young child that is), and include learning the alphabet and nouns, making music, identifying parts of the face and body, and being exposed to foreign languages. The initial inspiration for the game flow design is the long-lasting but timeless paying (not-for-free) Sesame Street software “Baby and Me” (now often marketed under the title “Elmo and Me”). Instead of being an adapted, watered-down version of more complicated games for older children, these kiddiesgames are designed from the ground up for under 5 year olds.
“Share these games with your baby the way you would share a picture book - a talking, moving, reacting picture book!” says Emma.
Indeed, like a children’s bookstore, the website features a smorgasbord of beautiful books and products for children, and a few for caregivers, available from Amazon.com. Sales commission from purchases made at Amazon.com after clicking through to there from kiddiesgames.com is how the kiddiesgames.com website is actually supported, allowing the kiddiesgames to be played for free. “We designed the website to have the feel of browsing and relaxing in a library or bookstore.” explains Emma.
The games are targeted at babies and preschoolers, from 9 months to 5 years old, playing on the computer with the “on the lap” supervision of their caregiver. However, children twice that age, the older siblings of the software “testers”, have been observed to enjoy and be pleasantly challenged by the foreign language games, which will teach the baby’s adult caregiver some foreign language too. It has also been suggested that these colorful, attractive, simple and quick games would be suitable for older children with special education needs.
The reaction to kiddiesgames from other mothers has been one of excitement and delight. “What a great site!”, “It's terrific” ,“I love it...keep up the good work!”, “What a cute site! I loved those games”, “What wonderful things on the internet now for kids!”, “I love your site! I have already passed it along to my friends” are just some of the comments made by mothers about kiddiesgames that can be found on the message boards at www.wahm.com.
The games work on Windows, Macintosh, and yes, on the free open-source Linux.
The children featured in the games are multicultural and multilingual – namely English, Spanish and French. Some of the games teach Spanish and French to English-speaking children and their caregivers.
“The initial emphasis on language exposure is a good thing,” states Emma. “This is the age that babies’ brains are soaking up and developing language. Early exposure to foreign languages increases a person’s future capacity to recognize and reproduce the sounds of that language,” continues Emma, this time referring to Chapter 14 of “What’s Going On In There?”
“Those myths about babies learning more than one language at a time are wrong,” explains Emma. “Bilingual children do NOT have delayed language acquisition. Learning more than one language at a time is NOT difficult for small children. Bilingual children DO master both languages just as well as one. These are the results coming out of research being done at McGill University in Montreal, that were explained to us when our first child participated in a language study on babies carried out there by Dr. Elin Thordardottir.” More details about these types of research results have been published on the web by Fred Genesee Ph.D., also of McGill University, at http://www.earlychildhood.com/Articles/index.cfm?FuseAction=Article&A=38.
The kiddiesgames’ creator is a Work-At-Home-Mother. “After 15 years in the computing industry producing bills for utility companies, developing these games is the most fun I’ve ever had. I feel like all my experience, both work and personal/family, has groomed me for this Work-At-Home job,” concludes Emma. “I’ve put my heart into these kiddiesgames. The voiceovers and the original testers of this software are my kids – I love that!”
Emma explains that lots of new games are planned to be added to the website as they are developed. “We can’t keep up with all the interesting, fun ideas for games that we have,” she says.
BABIES SLOW DOWN TIME...These tiny people can actually reverse time. A friend of mine once played with his ten-month-old daughter for an entire afternoon, and by the time his wife came home, the man was seven years old. No kidding around, he was, astonishingly enough, a scant six or seven years older than his own child.
quoted from "Babyhood" by Paul Reiser of television's "Mad About You", page 168
Small children should be supervised by a caregiver when at a computer,
to ensure no accidents occur that could hurt the child and that no equipment gets broken.