It’s been a while since I’ve taken a real hard look at the content and apps my kids have been consuming. We always keep an eye out for anything crazy, but I also like to get them interested in content I know is good for them and obviously safe from things they shouldn’t be seeing. I recently took a second look at getting them signed up for the Amazon FreeTime Unlimited
Much to my dismay, the service is only available on fire tablets, fire tv and android devices. It’s been becoming a bit of a hassle trying to get the kids a single platform that they can use for most activities. It seems like there is always some politics involved with what service is available on what. From a parents point of view, I wish everyone just got along.
However the good news is, I recently got my kids into Osmo and they have loved it. My secret parent goal is to trick them into liking programming. Math, Puzzles, and some creativeness keeps them engaged pretty well. Osmo isn’t the entire good news, since it runs on the iPad though. The good news is I’m secretly graduating them to start working on Raspberry Pis.
There are a couple cool coding for kids books for the Pi I’d like to get them involved with (like this one) and since they will each have their own Raspberry Pi I can also load android OS onto it so that they can consume Amazon FreeTime. This might be something I need to figure out how to dual boot though… or hopefully they can figure it out.
Sorry about my rant, but ultimately this post was to reach out to other parents to see how the service is and if its worth the hassle of setting up other devices. I will still go and set it up myself just so I can take a look and will give a solid review around Amazon FreeTime. I’ll give two sides to the review, the parent features and the things the kids like about it. Let me know below in the comments if you are using it and what you like or dislike about it.
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