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Offline.kids – Screen-free activities for kids
- throwanem 1y agoNo one needs to hear their screen reader say "yellow squiggle."
- topheroo 1y agoI wonder how much of the site was AI-generated. The images definitely are (kids with different numbers of fingers from each other in the same picture lol).
- TheRealPomax 1y agoYou could just have read the "about" page. Who cares if there's AI involved, this is a dad who made a thing for his own kids, and opened it up for everyone else. So what if they used AI if it does what they hoped it'd do and their kids like it?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 1y ago> So what if they used AI It matters because it's a very strong signal of quality.
- snapcaster 1y agoI'd say it's a strong signal of (lack of) effort, which then correlates with quality
- lynndotpy 1y agoAnd, crucially, the quality _is_ low. At a bare minimum, the generated safety bulletpoints should be able to anticipate safety concerns with following the generated activities. The people publishing the posts should read them first and check for safety concerns. The generated posts don't meet this bare minimum. For example, some posts have activities for toddlers involving string or rope, but do not mention the non-obvious strangulation risks. This website should not have been published in this state.
- nemomarx 1y agoFine for them, but why would I use it instead of using my own AI for my own kids? It's like reading other people's chat gpt conversations, not very interesting or useful.
- watwut 1y agoBecause, if you AI generated the activities too, the site is useless. We can ChatGpt generate activities too and get the same result.
- cush 1y agoI feel while developers continue to spend their time and energy gatekeeping how people build things, AI is going to continue to enable those people to build what they want. You'd be surprised how little people care about how a product was built and just want it to do the things they need it to do. The MySpace era internet where anyone can create a page is back and I'm here for it
- beshrkayali 1y agoQuality, security, and code that doesn't fall apart later matter. I don't want AI slop children books to be a thing. I hear you on AI making it easier for people to build stuff, but calling valid concerns "gatekeeping" is a bit off. With that said, I really like this site and the approach!
- tstrimple 1y agoIf those things actually mattered they would be rewarded in the "free marketplace of ideas". But they aren't and never have been. The most wealthy companies in the world aren't wealthy because of the quality of their code. That's why literally zero Very Large Organizations prioritize code quality. Marketing matters far more than quality and the budgets demonstrate this. You're just holding it wrong.
- beshrkayali 1y agoYou're missing the point. Some slice of the market ignoring quality doesn't make it unimportant. Those companies get burned by tech debt and security holes all the time. Brushing off quality and security as pointless is shortsighted.
- uoaei 1y agoThe study linked in OP is already a clear counterexample to your point, though. It's clear from all the slop that quality control is low on the priority list of so-called "builders" using AI. They do the first 20% to get a mockup and then decide it's done.
- 1y ago
- pton_xd 1y agoI really want the "Note from the Founder" to be fully AI generated too, image and everything. Our fully unauthentic web of the future has finally arrived!
- duxup 1y agoIt's not like before AI we got a lot of genuine founder stories either ;)
- valbaca 1y agois that true? I thought communicating what a full-sight person would see is important. Accessibility isn't just about text. Closed-captions vs Subtitles.
- throwanem 1y agoClose your eyes. Imagine you are using your computer or phone, but that for tedious reasons you may only do so via the extremely lossy KVM that is me. Do you need to hear me say "yellow squiggle?" The point of accessibility isn't an equivalent experience, which is trivially impossible in any case. The point is to make the material as useful, wherein possible. Especially when everything in the UI costs its user the time of its verbal description, "as useful" very often means ensuring the irrelevant is left out.
- kfajdsl 1y agofyi your (?) css is messed up for the 'Show activities by...' images on a viewport that's the size of a macbook pro 14" display split in half vertically
- advisedwang 1y agoVery weird errors in the site, is this AI generated? When you click on the 2 year old options, it says "6 Activities for Kids Aged 2" despite there being 19 shown, and the text begins "Nine-year-olds are full of ideas..." The images are good but kinda off... e.g. for https://offline.kids/activity/water-play-tub/ https://offline.kids/activity/water-play-tub/ the kid and tub are floating in a even larger body of water, and for https://offline.kids/activity/fabric-sensory-tunnel/ https://offline.kids/activity/fabric-sensory-tunnel/ there is a magical rigid blanket-tunnel.
- woadwarrior01 1y agoThe images are certainly GPT Image 1 generated. Also, the text on the about page is almost certainly AI generated.
- bongodongobob 1y agoLooks exactly like images generated by M365 copilot if I don't ask for something specific.
- tinier_subsets 1y agoI never fully believed the “em-dashes are an AI giveaway” meme — until I saw that front page.
- RyanOD 1y agoIt's funny to use the online to help us with activities our kids can do offline.
- Triphibian 1y agoPhone obsessed parent looking at website while kids stand with rocks in hand by lake, not knowing what to do. "It says you throw the rocks into the water and have fun."
- RyanOD 1y agoToo funny. "Wait, wait, Steven...there is an app I can download that will let me track your stone skipping attempts to ensure you are trending toward an optimal stone choice, angle of attack, and release velocity..."
- wintermutestwin 1y agoCan we please stop using “screens” as a pejorative? There are plenty of examples where a screen provides a better and more enriching/edifying experience than dead trees, etc
- cush 1y agoWhere do you see "screens" used in the pejorative?
- IshKebab 1y agoOn the linked page: > Discover simple, screen-free activities The implication that screens are bad is obvious to normal people. The evidence is less clear: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9d0l40v551o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9d0l40v551o
- cush 1y agoI don't think pejorative means what you think it means
- IshKebab 1y agoYou made me doubt myself so I looked it up: > expressing contempt or disapproval. Exactly what I thought. "Screen-free" is clearly implying disapproval of screen time. What do you think pejorative means?
- cush 1y ago> "Screen-free" is clearly implying disapproval of screen time. This is entirely an assumption on your part. Just because parents are looking for screen-free activities doesn't mean they're anti-screen. They're two totally different things. Most parents want to balance screen time with screen-free time. This doesn't imply anything. When you see a gluten-free option on a menu, do you feel so attacked? While some people may be so gluten-free that they impose their preachy anti-bread beliefs on others, most folks don't and are either looking to avoid wheat or have an allergy.
- zeld4 1y agoit should be a printable book.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Leftb 1y agoThe fact that 'join a X group/class/workshop' shows up so often does make this a lot less useful. When you're looking for "easy-to-set-up activities for kids of all ages" a sign up process with some external organization isn't really 'it'.
- footlose_3815 1y agoTo think, it's possible this entire thing was vibe coded.
- joewhale 1y agoit 100% was. i wonder in 2-3 years if it will start being harder to tell.
- throwanem 1y agoIt is already pretty hard to tell.
- ahofmann 1y agoI'm honestly shocked how hard it is to prove that the site is ai generated. There is a very strong ai-vibe, but to find proof in the pictures is hard on most of them (not the pizza one, that one looks awful).
- throwanem 1y agoI'm shocked it didn't occur to me to wonder whether it had been AI-extruded, until I saw everyone else talking about it. The thought of passing on advice, which I myself first received about a generation ago, really was as far as I got. On the other hand, I have yet to take on a client this year, and so my perspective on AI developments at the IC level is mildly idiosyncratic; I know a grain of salt is required, but not how large a one, and my own experiments reveal a radically different set of capabilities and drawbacks than the technology's manic or epistaxic boosters like to describe. Judging by what I'm seeing lately here and elsewhere, the workaday tech industry world must be developing into a genuinely horrifying grind, and I'm glad to be out of it.
- woadwarrior01 1y ago> I'm honestly shocked how hard it is to prove that the site is ai generated. It's not. At least for images, it's very easy to tell. OpenAI watermark all their generated images with C2PA.
- EduardLev 1y agoThis looks like it could be really cool. However there are obvious mistakes pointed out by other comments which makes me distrust the content. I'm sure there are still good ideas in there, I just don't think they would be as creative as I would likr
- DataDaoDe 1y agoJust put your kids outside. You don't need anything as a kid to start playing. We used sticks and mud and built ourselves houses and towns and had wars and put on plays and did everything under the sun without toys or anything. Some trees and dirt will take you a long way providing thousands of hours of fun. As kids we found these big black horned beetles and started a beetle gladiator arena that kept us preoccupied for months at a time feeding and training our biggest beetles. Kids are very creative if you let them be.
- hnlmorg 1y agoExactly this. We have so many outdoor toys from footballs and outdoor table tennis tables, to outdoor chalk, sand pits and so on and so forth. Yet most of the time the boys just want water fights and the girls just want to do cartwheels. Structured play is definitely important. But unstructured play even more so. It’s amazing what kids can find to entertain themselves when they’re left alone.
- percentcer 1y agoPredatory AI-generated site feeding off parents' anti-screen anxiety, no thanks. We need Klutz to come back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klutz_Press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klutz_Press
- ravenstine 1y agoI remember having the juggling one! Thanks for reminding me of Klutz. I'm hoping to finally have kids in the near future and, while I don't want to completely shield them from all tech, I do want to ground them in reality with "real" activities. I may order a bunch of their books in the future.
- toisanji 1y agoNice work on offline.kids and kudos for tackling screen-free play. I've been playing in a similar space. If you want something complementary for the inevitable “but why?” moments, you might like StudyTurtle Ask (https://studyturtle.com/ask https://studyturtle.com/ask). It’s a free, no-signup AI Q&A tuned for 3–9 year-olds with: Strict age calibration (matching phrasing and examples to each developmental level) Concrete analogies (“volcanoes are like shaken soda bottles”) and kitchen-table experiments you can actually do
- sram1337 1y agoSome context from the dev's blog (https://highrise.digital/blog/building-offline-kids-a-directory-of-screen-free-kids-activities/ https://highrise.digital/blog/building-offline-kids-a-direct... --- "Within the last few weeks, Mark and I have built and launched Offline.Kids. It’s a website to help parents reconnect with their kids and for kids to reconnect with the world around them. Offline.Kids is directory of screen-free activities for all ages. Each activity is categorised so that parents can find appropriate activities for their situation. For example, you can find: quick, clean activities for a 6 year olds outdoor kids activities that take 1-2 hours low energy indoor crafts We built the site off the back of our new directory landing page plugin (catchy name still in progress!). It instantly creates thousands of SEO friendly landing pages for the activities. It’s early days, but Google is successfully indexing the pages and we’ll see how the rankings change over time. So, if you’re looking for screen-free activities for your kids, check out the website, and share with anyone you think might find it useful!"
- lynndotpy 1y agohttps://offline.kids/activity/indoor-obstacle-course/ https://offline.kids/activity/indoor-obstacle-course/ Did anyone even review these AI generated posts before publishing? It's one thing to publish something you didn't write, but it's another thing to publish something you didn't even bother to read: This activity for ages 3 to 10: > Instructions > 1. Clear a safe space in your home > 2. Set up crawling sections under chairs > 3. Create jumping stations with pillows > 4. Make balance beams with rope > 5. Design tunnels with boxes First, you should not be leaving children unattended around string or rope (the materials listed here). It's negligent to have that absent from the safety tips, and it's concerning that knowledge is obscure enough that the text generator wouldn't provide a bullet point with that advice. But also, how many people have a place where they can "Make balance beams with rope"? What low-to-the-floor fixtures do people commonly have with the sheer strength to make a tightrope for children to walk across?
- JdeBP 1y agoInterestingly, for it being built as part of the promotional effort for the authors's LLM-based WordPress WWW-site generator that autocreates (in their promotional blurb's own words) thousands of topic pages instantly for search-engine "optimization", this has been submitted onto http://url.town http://url.town as one of only two entries in that site's "Family" section. This promotion clearly worked. * https://highrise.digital/blog/building-offline-kids-a-directory-of-screen-free-kids-activities/ https://highrise.digital/blog/building-offline-kids-a-direct... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765730#44782446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765730#44782446
- aklemm 1y agoSomeone thinks they're really killing it with AI project, and that really bothers me. I'm pretty sure I don't want to see ANY AI unless it is labeled as such.
- keithdevon 1y agoSite author here! Really interesting to read all of this feedback. The site was built with WordPress using a tool that we've developed. It's been populated by me, using AI to help come up with activity ideas and the activity content. You should see the suggestions, content and images that don't make it through! Ideally, this would all be community generated and made by humans, but I'm doing this on my own and I don't have the experience of all the activities. Using Ai was a way to get lots of activities on there quickly, to try to test the concept. I agree that in some cases the quality isn't up to scratch, and I appreciate some of the feedback, which I'll do my best to fix. This is a personal project of mine, scratching my own itch as a parent who needs inspiration for what to do. I thought that it might be useful for others too.