With the close of 2009, Zoodles marks its first year as a company! 2009 has treated us well: we’ve seen the growth and development of our team, our product, and most importantly, our network of families and supporters. We couldn’t have asked for a better first year, or a better group of people to help ring in our second. Who knows what 2010 has in store…but we’re turning one! It’s time to celebrate!
Being a parent, like most of you, my last couple of weeks have been incredibly busy. With family visiting, gifts to purchase, and work to be done I forgot to blog…. sorry about that! I want to take this moment to wish you and your little ones a happy holidays! We hope all of your child’s dreams came true and that the holidays were relaxing and enjoyable to you.
Best,
Mark
We’re kicking off this holiday season by asking all our friends and family to consider sharing Zoodles as a gift with loved ones big and small! Zoodles is truly the gift that keeps on giving, as it harnesses the power of the Internet and stays unbeatably fresh with the best educational content on the web.
Whether it’s Zhu Zhu pets, a new Lego set, or the latest Leapfrog game, no gift has better staying power than Zoodles. As every Toybox gets filled daily with new games and activities, Zoodles will continue to entertain and educate your loved ones’ children long after the holidays are through.
And children aren’t the only ones who benefit! With the gift of Zoodles, you provide parents with unmatched insights into their child’s latest interests, and complete control over their child’s safety online.
You’ve experienced the joy of Zoodles yourself, now reach out to friends and family and share with them an award-winning product with long-lasting benefits.
Scholastic is a household name in education, and we’re happy to announce that Zoodles now features some great games from their site! Scholastic has done a fantastic job creating content that is fun and educational, basing their games on popular books and characters that your children know and love. Nothing more satisfying than using the appeal of Harry Potter and Captain Underpants to indulge the literary senses of kids around the world! Here are the top 5 Scholastic picks from our always amazing Education Team:
Your child lear
ns ways to recycle and the importance of helping the environment by clicking on different places in the community and answering questions in the form of a quiz.
Your child learns about grammar and parts of speech by filling in a Mad-libs type form and creating their own story.
Your child learns about different artists by matching each artist’s description to his/her painting.
Your child explores and engages with the virtual dinosaur environment by making decisions about which rocks to turn over in search of dragonflies, fossils, and other objects.
Your child develops fine motor skills and a basic understanding of motion while timing darts to pop balloons.
Zoodles is proud to announce the release of a major new feature, ad-blocking! With Zoodles ad-blocking enabled, children will no longer be exposed to ads within the Zoodles browser.
Since the founding of the company we have heard over and over again from parents that the advertising their children are subjected to results in parents being less comfortable putting their children online. As a parent I feel the same way and I have personally found many of the ads that are displayed on sites for children not only annoying, but in some cases disturbing. Here are a few examples of ads that we have found on sites for children:
Just look at this Nissan ad we found on a popular gaming site! Do they really think 7 year olds are interested in cash back on a sedan?
What parent wants their child playing a game described as “Action Shooter Meets Gang Themed MMO”… much less even looking at the ad!:
And finally, here is an ad I am happy that my daughter will now never see again - Hugh Hefner with partially dressed women promoting a video game! Not the example I want to set for my 5 year old daughter!
I am happy to state that all of these ads will be blocked by the new and improved Zoodles browser!
Blocking advertising from children will also result in their ability to better concentrate on the games and activities they are trying to perform. A child who is playing a challenging math game won’t have to waste working memory on the giant flashing advertisement next to the game, they will be able to use all their cognitive abilities on learning!
Below is an image that shows the difference the Zoodles ad-blocker can make. The screen shot on the left shows a game from Nick Jr. with all the advertisements highlighted in red while the screen shot on the right shows the same game with the Zoodles ad-blocking enabled. Notice all the sections of the screenshot on the right that are highlighted green… these are where the ads used to be. For those you counting, yes if you counted correctly… there were 8 ads on the original page!
Here is another game for children showing the before and after effects of Zoodles blocking ads targeted to children.
With over 18 advertisements targeted to children in the above screen shot you can really see the effect of removing ads from the child’s experience.
I want to thank the entire team for working hard on building this new Premium Feature, especially Michael on our engineering team! Every family who signs-up for Zoodles will get a free trial of the Zoodles Premium Membership and they can test this feature out for themselves. For any of you parents out there that find ads still showing up in Zoodles, just let us know and we will hunt them down and find a way to block them!
So if you hate advertisements targeted toward children be sure to tell your friends about Zoodles and how we block advertisements from kids!
How does one top working on some of the most popular web products in the world like Google Maps and Gmail? Well, you come to work at Zoodles of course! I am pleased to announce that Dave Young, who spent the last 3.5 years at Google has joined us here at Zoodles to lead up our product design efforts. Dave has a strong track record of creating compelling user experiences and I am really excited to have him join the team! Here is a little more formal write-up about Dave’s background:
Dave Young has joined Zoodles to lead our Product Design as we expand our offerings to provide new online experiences that are fun and easy to use. Dave comes to us from Google where he was a User Experience Designer on Google Maps, Google Trends, Google Docs, OpenSocial, Sharing, Google Moderator, Gmail and Adwords. Prior to Google Dave also worked as a User Experience Designer for Scholastic.com and was a Teachers Assistant for Kindergarten, Pre-K and Preschool at a Reggio Emilia™ school. Dave attended Carnegie Mellon University where he completed a BFA in “Communication Design” and a MS in “Human Computer Interaction”.
Welcome Dave!
One of the great things about starting a company like Zoodles in Silicon Valley is the proximity to Stanford University. Stanford students and graduates are incredibly bright and hard working, so when it came time to build our education team, we knew we wanted to fill it with graduates from Stanford who focused on education. Before telling you a bit about each member of the team I want to share with you a little bit about the work the team does.
One of the first tasks the team took on was to dissect and understand both national and state educational standards. We infused these standards into the Zoodles product which means that we are able to appropriately target games to children based on their age / grade level as well as their specific abilities (e.g. – ability to read). With this understanding of educational standards the team then scoured the web finding the best games for children and tagging them appropriately. In short, this team is responsible for ensuring that Zoodles has the most fun & educational content possible for children! As you will see, we have an incredibly talented and highly qualified team for this task and reading through their bios should give you both a sense of comfort about who is screening content for your children as well as a sense of how seriously we take our role as curators of your child’s internet experience.
Rachel Yong started working at Zoodles back in January while also enrolled in Stanford’s Masters Program in Learning, Design, and Technology. After five years at Stanford (including her undergrad), she is glad to say that she’s finally graduated! With a passion for using technology to help kids learn, you can imagine what a perfect fit Zoodles is for her. Working on the Zoodles Education Team has been a huge pleasure, both because she’s had the privilege of meeting Debbie and Nicole – extreme content experts – but also because she’s had the chance to start building her own expertise in the domain. For example, she can confidently say that she now knows the national and state standards better than the back of her hand! Even more importantly, she’s had the chance to really think about how to structure Zoodles so the games kids play can truly adapt to them and complement their natural cognitive and emotional development.
It’s hard to choose her favorite games after poring over so many great ones, but she can easily say which games she has personally spent playing – “off duty,” of course! – and those would be Fantastic Contraption and Untangle. For kicks, she’ll also throw in the Most Grating Branded Characters (Based on Laugh), and they would be Dora the Explorer and Curious George…by a LANDSLIDE.
Debbie Heimowitz has been part of the education team at Zoodles for the past seven months. Her background is creating educational films (including the Adina’s Deck series), as well as working at Disney Channel and Warner Bros. She loves discovering new games and videos that are both fun and educational! The most important thing is that kids are having fun while they are learning, which is her favorite part about Zoodles (and, of course, the amazing team!). The ratings and educational features are custom tailored to each child and parent- how cool is that! Debbie holds a Master’s degree in Education from Stanford University and Bachelors degree in Film Studies from UC Berkeley. In addition to Zoodles, Debbie creates & works in children’s films/tv, and teaches 5th/6th grade at a performing arts school. She hopes you are enjoying Zoodles and that you will check back frequently for new updates!
Nicole Holthuis has many years of experience as a teacher (high school biology), teacher educator, curriculum developer, educational researcher and evaluator. She did her undergraduate work at UC Davis in Biology and then continued on at Stanford where she earned a Master’s degree and PhD in education. She has had the opportunity to apply her skills to classrooms and non-profit programs around the Bay Area, with a focus on improving science curriculum and instruction in heterogeneous classrooms.
Nicole joined the Zoodles team about six months ago and is having a blast switching gears from a focus on learning that happens in the classrooms to learning that happens at home on the computer She has three children, ages 8, 10, and 12, so she has first-hand knowledge of the challenges of finding safe, quality content on the web that her children will enjoy and learn from. “One of my favorite things about working at Zoodles is the opportunity it gives me to discover some amazing websites. There are some really poorly developed educational games and activities out there but there are so many real gems that are fun, stimulating and incredibly educational. In particular, I tend to get completely caught up in the logic, problem-solving, and spatial reasoning games that I have been reviewing. Don’t tell Mark but I’d probably get more work done if some of these sites weren’t so darn challenging yet fun.” You can check out some of Nicole’s favorites: Stained Glass and Line Rider on Zoodles.
Sometimes getting your kids to read can feel a lot like pulling teeth. After a long day of school, they might try to convince you that “learning time” is over. So how do we make “learning time” fun again? How do we make learning so fun that kids don’t even realize they’re learning, and become eager to learn all the time?
Here at Zoodles we realized that we have a TON of information about how to make this possible. After all, we have a huge number of kids playing in Zoodles every day, and they’re all learning without even knowing it! We decided to take a deep dive into our data and see what reading games Zoodles kids have been playing on, and which of them have emerged as the tried-and-true Top 5 Most Fun. For this study, we focused on kids ages 5 – 6, since the early reading experience (in school and at home) is so critical to a child’s academic success and can even predict reading achievement through 6th grade. The “funness” of a game was determined by how long kids generally spent playing the game.
Let us know if your kids play these, or other, favorites!
Your child develops the basics in reading sight words while helping the Wonder Pets save a baby triceratops.
Educational value: Book and Print Basics, Early Reading / Phonics, Sight Words, Reading Comprehension, Elements of a Story
Your child develops logic, matching, and vocabulary skills by listening to a series of words and then choosing the object that those words describe.
Educational Value: Vocabulary and Concept Development, Word Meanings
Your child develops early reading and memory skills by matching pictures with the first letter of their name.
Educational Value: Early Reading / Phonics, Matching Letters to Sounds, Decoding and Word Recognition, Syllables / Word Parts
Your child develops reading skills as well as investigation and matching skills by reading along and solving the mystery.
Educational Value: Reading Comprehension, Elements of a Story
Your child develops spelling skills while using letters to build words.
Educational Value: Early Reading / Phonics, Matching letters to sounds, Spelling, Vowels and Consonants
All the Zoodles-approved games listed here are accessible from a 5- or 6-year-old’s Zoodles Toybox!
Las Madres, a great local parenting group, held an event last night at the San Jose Children’s Discovery Museum. My wife & I first got involved with Las Madres when we moved to the Bay Area over 3 years ago, and we found the events and playgroups incredibly useful. In fact, we met many of our good friends in the area through Las Madres. So last night was a great night – Zoodles was an 
exhibitor at one of their family events and we had a chance to show Zoodles to both children and parents. As the picture shows, we had three computers running Zoodles so children could come over and play and I am happy to report that children were engaged the entire evening (actually we had some children still playing 40 minutes after the event officially ended!).
By the way, if you live in the Bay Area, or travel here with family, I highly recommend the Children’s Discovery Museum. They have lots of great exhibits for both children and parents. My daughters and I *really* love the Water Works section, and my wife likes to point out that it was built for young children but I am normally the adult there who is having as much fun, if not more fun, than the children.
My daughter Abbie (pictured left with me at her “preschool graduation hoedown”), like many 5 year olds, loves to play on the computer. She first showed an interest in the computer after watching my wife, Tara, and I use our laptops. At the age of one and a half she would toddle over and want to simply bang on the keyboard (kids love to mimic their parents!). One of her birthday gifts when she turned 2 was a custom “kid’s keyboard” along with some CD-ROM games that taught some of the most basic of concepts – color recognition, shape recognition, and simple cause & effect. She really loved playing on the computer, and so when her fine motor skills progressed she had her first taste of the internet – PBSKids. While she loved being on the computer, she would also exhibit signs of frustration and every 15 – 20 minutes we would invariably get called into help her with some computer problem.
Last fall I had a chance to sit down and really observe Abbie on the computer and it was clear that her online experience was broken:
While Abbie’s experience as a child was painful, I think I was in as much pain as a parent watching this, but often for different reasons:
I quickly started looking for a product that could solve these problems, and to my dismay there simply weren’t any products designed for younger children that solved these problem. After talking to other parents it was clear to me that millions of parents were all looking for a safe way for their children to get online and have an engaging and educational experience.
It didn’t take long to convince Rich, my co-founder and technical mastermind behind Zoodles, that this was an important and meaningful problem to solve. We started Zoodles with the intent of not only creating a better online experience for children, but a safe, engaging and educational experience that kids would love and parents would value. In future posts we will talk a bit more about the Zoodles offering, but understanding our motivation for starting Zoodles will put those posts into better context.
- Mark Williamson (co-founder and CEO of Zoodles)
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