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iPads have a lot of good stuff, I think. I've 2x 7 year old girls, which have iPads. Generally they're limited to 1h/day, but screentime is off for: - Codea - https://codea.io - it took a while, but eventually they found out that there's a few sample games, so they thought they'd found a loophole to "no more screentime for games". Then it took a bit longer until they realized they can tweak the source code. "Look at this, no gravity" or "Look at my high score!" (after tweaking the scores to increase in increments of 1000 instead of 1), or "Look, I changed the text messages" etc. - Swift Playgrounds - they're not super fascinated with this, but I see them occasionally open it and noodle around. - Procreate - they have an Apple Pencil, and any YouTube video about using Procreate is exempt from Screentime limits. This has led to a lot of amazing digital illustrations. - Pages - just this simple built-in app is already pretty fun if kids are bored, and something is exempt from screentime. Last weekend one of them asked to go to Starbucks, because she's "writing a novel". She wrote a short story over ~5 pages, and was super proud of it. - YouTube - in general, this is my least favorite app of theirs, and I try to police this the most. But any requests for videos where you learn things are exempt from screentime limits (case by case). E.g. Lego builds, origami, drawing instructions, "how to make slime at home" videos, etc. This is a great question, and I'm eager to see what other creativity-fostering approaches are there. But to sum up my approach - limit screentime for mindless games, and let boredom take care of the rest. |
I like to idea of using a DTP app (look at the old guy).
Have your girls tried the lessons at code.org? My ~6 year old really enjoys doing them. They're touch optimized which is nice as well.