Using your mobile device to keep children entertained and learning new skills is easier than ever, thanks to kid-friendly Israeli app developers. What do you get when you combine Israel’s talents in high-tech with its child-centered society? Terrific mobile applications for children. We chose just 10 to feature, but you can find tons more if you poke around the app marketplace.
Thanks to Israel21c for the links and stories.
1. TinyTap
Selected by Mashable as a top-five “digital distraction” for kids and their parents, TinyTap is a free, intuitive game-creation platform for iPad and iPhone. Parents, teachers and children can design their own educational games or choose one from the TinyTap Social Market. On January 8 of this year, TinyTap was one of three apps to receive the $1 million Verizon Powerful Answers award.
2. My PlayHome
This dollhouse for the iPad generation was cited in The New York Times’ “Apps to Keep Children Happy” list two years ago. Kids can open the closets, turn on the TV and shower, fry an egg, pour drinks, blow bubbles and other fun stuff. The advantages of a virtual dollhouse: It can go anywhere and there are no pieces to lose or get broken. Plus, the house can be expanded and accessorized. Recommended for ages 1-7.
3. sCoolWork
The Israeli startup Skills & Knowledge created this app to help students write essays better and faster. It’s an organizational aid to format an assignment, check grammar and spelling, add a bibliography and even search the Internet more effectively. Teachers have given sCoolWork a thumbs-up.
What do you get when you combine Israel’s talents in high-tech with its child-centered society? Terrific mobile applications for children. We chose just 10 to feature, but you can find tons more if you poke around the app marketplace.
1. TinyTap
Selected by Mashable as a top-five “digital distraction” for kids and their parents, TinyTap is a free, intuitive game-creation platform for iPad and iPhone. Parents, teachers and children can design their own educational games or choose one from the TinyTap Social Market. On January 8 of this year, TinyTap was one of three apps to receive the $1 million Verizon Powerful Answers award.
2. My PlayHome
This dollhouse for the iPad generation was cited in The New York Times’ “Apps to Keep Children Happy” list two years ago. Kids can open the closets, turn on the TV and shower, fry an egg, pour drinks, blow bubbles and other fun stuff. The advantages of a virtual dollhouse: It can go anywhere and there are no pieces to lose or get broken. Plus, the house can be expanded and accessorized. Recommended for ages 1-7.
3. sCoolWork
The Israeli startup Skills & Knowledge created this app to help students write essays better and faster. It’s an organizational aid to format an assignment, check grammar and spelling, add a bibliography and even search the Internet more effectively. Teachers have given sCoolWork a thumbs-up.
4. Touchoo
- Books for little fingers – Touchoo.
Subtitled “Books for Little Fingers,” Touchoo offers interactive children’s book-apps on all kinds of devices. You can buy one ready-made or use Touchoo Creator to create and publish your own, complete with animation, point-and-click interface and sound interaction. Your book is published instantly on the App Store, Google Play, Amazon and Nook (there is a fee, but all proceeds are your own). Each app-book is available in many formats on a Web-based platform for easy collaboration.
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With this coloring app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, children ages 2-7 can do symmetrical drawings on the wings of an animated butterfly, bee, dragon, peacock or unicorn. The creatures laugh, get excited or faint in reaction to the choice and pattern of colors or animated decoration placed on the wing. They’ll even hand your child a towel if the virtual paint spills from the color palette, which doubles as a musical xylophone. There is optional animation, such as flowers that open and close, lights that blink, hearts that beat. Save drawings by clicking the camera icon.
Preschoolers can play this highly interactive game as a “brother” or a “sister.” There are activities and tasks to perform in each of six rooms, as well as in the garden: taking a bath, tidying the bedroom, making pancakes with mom, picking flowers, brushing teeth, putting on pajamas, etc., all accompanied by sounds and graphics. The “day” ends by going to sleep with a satisfying snore.
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One of several iPhone-iPad apps made by Kids 1st Shape Puzzles, this virtual jigsaw puzzle is a natural for tots fascinated by trucks, diggers, tractors, trains, boats, ambulances and planes — 70 vehicles in all. Players who place the pieces correctly get rewarded by hearing the sound made by the vehicle, and they also hear its name pronounced in Hebrew or English.
8. My Body
Why learn just one language when you can learn three all at once? The My Body app for iPhone and iPad teaches children the words for body parts in English, Spanish and Hebrew. The application is divided into three categories: Front, back and head.
9.HowDo
- HowDo hopes to answer kids questions.
Curious kids have a million questions. This iPhone-iPad app aims to answer them with the aid of 150 detailed photos and sound effects covering 54 topics. How are butterflies formed? How do rainbows appear in the sky? How do they make ice cream? How is a chair manufactured? How does a letter dropped in the mailbox reach its destination? How do you ride a bike? There are free and paid versions of the app available.
10.Santa Rescue Saga: Doctor X Christmas Adventure
The most downloaded free Christmas iOS app in 2013, this game lets kids heal Santa’s cold, rescue him from a chimney or a block of ice and other sticky situations so that he can get to children’s homes on Christmas Eve. TabTale, the Israeli startup behind this iOS and Android app as well as hundreds of others, was ranked among the top 10 app publishers by ranking site AppAnnie.com.
The Waze of agriculture
Israel’s AgriTask software helps farmers large and small make better predictive choices based on crowdsourced data.
Which way will the wind blow or the crop-munching pests flow? Cosmologists, meteorologists and agronomists have tried to answer these questions since the beginning of time.
The Israeli company ScanTask is crowdsourcing data from the farm to answer these questions better, taking the guesswork and risks out of farming.
This is exactly the kind of technology that massive companies like PepsiCo, Syngenta, and Monsanto said that they needed at the recent Agrivest conference in Israel.
ScanTask, started in 2008 and operating in stealth mode until now, was founded by Israel Fraier, who calls his technology the Waze of agriculture.
Waze is an Israeli-designed app that lets users know about traffic patterns in real time to find the best route. It was sold to Google this year for $1 billion. ScanTask does the same crowdsourcing job for the farm, so that farmers can know what to plant, when to harvest and when it’s possible to avoid spraying.
- Farm management via smartphone.
- Follow this link tot he rest of the story: http://israel21c.org/headlines/the-waze-of-agriculture/
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Beer with an Israeli flavor
Take a taste of the microbrewery culture in Israel, courtesy of the Dancing Camel in Tel Aviv.
Click here to get a tour of the Dancing Camel, Israel’s oldest microbrewery.
The founders aim to give their beers a distinctively Israeli taste, so they use locally sourced ingredients such as date honey, pomegranates, rosemary and chili peppers.
Novel Israeli tech prevents aortic aneurysm progression
Minimally invasive laser-based therapy offers a promising alternative for hundreds of thousands of patients diagnosed each year.
Israel’s beloved singer Arik Einstein died on November 26, at age 74, from a ruptured aortic aneurysm. This condition is an abnormal ballooning of the body’s main artery that can lead to fatal internal bleeding.
Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is the 13th leading cause of death in most Western countries, and more than 200,000 new cases are diagnosed annually in the US alone.
If aneurysms could be treated early to prevent worsening, the incidence of rupture and death would fall dramatically. And that is the aim of a patented technology from Israel.
“Our purpose is to intervene at a stage where the aneurysm is not at the point where an emergency procedure is necessary,” says Dr. S. David Gertz, the Brandman Foundation Professor of Cardiac and Pulmonary Diseases at the Institute for Medical Research of The Hebrew University—Hadassah Medical School.
Current forms of treatment focus primarily on advanced stages of AAA and are associated with potentially life-threatening complications, explains Gertz, who heads the research project with Dr. Lilach Gavish.
Follow this link for the rest of the story: Novel Israeli Tech
