Kids Learning Resources

In chatting with a friend, I think it is useful to summarize a list of good resources for kids learning that I've used in the past.

Learning in this generation is very different given there are a lot of resources out on the internet. It is important to teach the kids to figure out the knowledge themselves.

General tools for knowledge acquisition

• Google search for web pages and images
• Youtube for any educational videos
  
• Wikipedia for simple explanation of any knowledge
• How stuff works
  

Geography and Site seeing

• Google Map for navigating to different places
• Using the street view feature by dragging the little person icon (at the top left corner) into the map, we can visit different countries virtually. Here is the Eiffel tower in Paris, France. Google street view is extending its coverage so expect to see more areas in the world being covered in future.
• Google Earth for an even more sophisticated 3D map navigation. Watch their introduction video.
  

History and Ancient Empire

• Virtual tour of Forbidden City in 3D
• Flying into the Ancient Rome
• Chinese history for kids (this site is in Chinese language)
  

Human Body

• BBC provides has a very useful site that explain human body in easy and fun way.
• There is also an animation of Human Body

Money Management

Develop a good economic sense and planning to use money wisely is important, especially when kids are commonly spoiled by their parents these days.

• Money management

Online Games

I normally don't recommend exposing video or online games to the kids unless they are carefully chosen for educational purposes. Kids are so easily addicted to games. But if you can use their addiction appropriately, it is a good way to motivated them to learn, and it is fun too.

Here are some exceptionally good ones from Lego

• Original Junkbot
• Junkbot version 2
• World builder
  

Game Designing

It is also good to teach them how a game is designed because this gives them an opportunity to switch roles (from a player to a designer) and establish a good overall picture. There are some very good tools for designing games.

• Gamemaker
• Scratch
  
• A great link for designing tools
  

Kids Programming

Programming is all about planning for the steps to achieve a goal, and debugging is all about using a systematic way to find out why something doesn't work out as planned. Even you are not planning your kids to be a programmer or a computer professional, teach them how to programming can develop a very good planning and analytical skills, which is very useful in their daily life.

• The famous LOGO Green turtle is a good start at age 6 - 7
• Lego Mindstorm is a very good one because kids are exposed not just to programming skills but other engineering skills (such as mechanics) as well. It costs some money but I think it is well worth.
• A great link for robot fans.
  
• At around age 10, I found a professional programming language can be taught. I have chosen Ruby given its expressiveness and simplicity.
• One of my colleagues has suggested BlueJ, basically Java, but I personally haven't tried that yet (given I am a Ruby fan).
  

Materials at all subjects and all levels

• Internet for schools provides a great long list that is extremely useful
• Khan has put together a set of good videos (each about 10 mins long) on Math, Physics and Economics, at the high school level