New York – Digital studio Tinybot’s latest children's app Me is designed to teach children emotional intelligence.
- Aimed at ages six to eight, Me hopes to give children the tools to better understand themselves
- Me is the latest addition to Tinybot’s library of apps that are designed to encourage open-ended play and creativity for kids
The app offers hundreds of questions that children can answer about themselves through drawings, photos, texts and recordings. The questions cover a range of topics from who is in their family to what their likes and dislikes are. The aim is to enable the child to create his or her own self-portrait.
The app was created in response to increased reporting of bullying and anxiety in the classroom. ‘Our goal with Me is to help kids build skills such as self-awareness, social awareness and emotional literacy,’ says the Tinybot blog. ‘These skills are essential to children’s ability to positively contribute to the world. Research suggests that the better kids understand themselves, the more able they are to be empathetic and understand others. Teaching empathy can help combat bullying, peer cruelty and the mental health epidemic.'
Acting like a digital diary, Me also ensures that nothing in the app is shared or distributed unless the child should choose to share it.
The Big Picture
Generation I digital natives are being given new tools to explore their emotions. For more on why the education curriculum should include emotional as well as academic teaching, see our macrotrend The Learning Economy.