What you need to know
- Google has introduced Kids Space for Android tablets.
- It's a child-friendly interface aimed at highlighting content suitable for young children.
- Kids Space is being made available on select Lenovo tablets first.
Google has been working on building out its mobile Android experience to be child-friendly. It has YouTube Kids and Family Link, it's also introduced a teacher-approved section of the Play Store to keep children learning at home. It even added a Read-Along app, aimed at helping younger kids start learning to read. Now. it's taking all these efforts to their logical conclusion and building in a new feaure — Kids Space — for Android devices. Specifically, it'll be made available on tablets.
Once engaged, it'll enable a colorful interface showcasing a selection of child-friendly media ranging from games to videos to books to apps. Google says this mode will only come on certain tablets, like Lenovo's upcoming Smart Tab M10 HD Gen 2 tablets. More Kids Space equipped tablets will be on their way soon, but Google didn't specify which brands.
Google's Mindy Brooks, UX Director, Kids and Families explained:
To evaluate and select "teacher-approved" apps in Google Play, we worked with academic experts and children's education specialists to define rubrics. For Kids Space, we've built on that foundation and applied our quality standard to an ever-expanding library of apps and books in the Play and Read tabs. We worked with top publishers to make popular children's books free of charge, and have over 400 free books available in the U.S. alone. In the Watch and Make tabs, your kids can view creative and fun videos from YouTube Kids that are engaging and encourage off-screen activities. And if you're looking to customize even more, parents can download additional content from Google Play.
It's a lot like the Kids Home feature which Samsung offers on its Galaxy phones and tablets,albeit with a stronger content curation focus. It's something that may become more useful as much of the learning process typically undertaken at school continues at home over the next couple of months.
