We are proud to support the launch of the Send Felicity, holiday advent activities for families to enjoy around the world. Inspired by Ian Chia of Being Prudence, Send Felicity encourages crafting the future with your own hands. Every day during the month of December, Felicity from Thin Air will surprise you with fun family activity ideas, illustrated by some of the most loved children’s book illustrators in the world. There will be eight arts and craft activities interspersed, allowing children and schools to contribute their work in a curated online exhibition. A complimentary app, soon to be released (it’s not on iTunes yet, we’ll keep you posted), will help the activities along. A special invitation to our Moms With Apps readers is written by Ian, below. Happy December!
Dear Moms With Apps Reader,
As a parent, you’re probably pretty happy to be living in the 21st century. Aside from the lack of flying cars and robots that do the house cleaning and washing, we’re pretty much all the way there, right?
We’ve got:
- phones that can call across the world for almost $0
- magic boxes of all sizes and shapes that allow us to buy stuff and sell stuff
- pocket sized computers that enable us to teach or distract children
- little ovens that cook stuff almost instantly
- cars that run off stuff that grow in the ground
- the ability to buy things from anywhere in the world. Anyone can be a seller and anyone can be a buyer.
All science fiction that’s come true, before we even noticed it. Google started up twelve years ago. YouTube five. The iPhone three. The iPad hasn’t even had a birthday yet.
Yet with all this cool and absolutely useful technology – why do we hanker for handmade goods? What have we lost in the bazaar style markets of eBay and the iTunes App Store. Why are we willing to pay more for something that’s been made by a person the slow way, instead of a machine in an efficient way? Why are there so many handmade and craft markets springing up around the world where we can meet the makers?
I’m a parent of two daughters. Grace who is 11 and Ella who is 8. As a parent, investing in their future like so many of you, I’ve grown interested in using these tools, like DVDs or the iPhone/iPad or whatever new gizmo, to ensure that my kids have a headstart in life. Even though the 21st century seems much brighter than the 20th, parents across the world share the same problems in education, as Sir Ken Robinson so eloquently points out.
I also stumbled into making family oriented software by accident. I had a lovely app idea and wanted to work with a children’s book illustrator friend. As a result of that, I discovered Momswithapps and joined its developer community. Through it, I listen to the successes and struggles within this vibrant community of developers – many of them parents, like you and I – with their hearts in the right place, stymied by the increasing noise of marketers and pedal-to-the-metal advertising.
There are roughly 4,500 apps approved every week. In October 2010, Apple approved almost 19,000 apps (some of the updates, some of them new.) Now, if I was setting up shop to sell stuff, I would be pretty disheartened to know that I’m a pebble on the beach.
At the same time, as a parent concerned about our headlong rush into this new world of GoogleYouTubeiPhoneAndroidiPadblahblahblah, I worry about where our education system is going. Are we really waiting for Superman to swoop in to save us? There’s a publishing crisis, a creativity crisis, an education crisis, there’s the economic crisis. Sir Ken Robinson pretty much nails it. We need to change, for the better.
So I and a bunch of concerned parents from around the world have decided to step up to the plate. We’re just parents, like yourselves. Our backgrounds come from a range of expertise. We’re software developers, children’s book illustrators, handmade artisans, writers, designers, educators – but still parents, invested in our children’s future.
We refuse to believe that a simple block of steel, glass and plastic can contain an education experience that’s better than living in the real world. But we want to take advantage of technology and use it to inspire, build thrilling learning experiences and teach our children how to innovate in an uncertain future. We also want technology to bring us closer together as a family and not further apart. We want to teach our children that living in the 21st century means being a good citizen, in real life and in the digital world. Sharing, collaboration, mutual respect is the same – whether the other person is standing next to you or across the world.
If what I’m talking about resonates with you, I’d like to invite you to come and help us remake the future with your own hands.
You are cordially invited to help us create happiness, or felicity from thin air. This December, we’re running an audacious experiment, disguised as a holiday advent calendar. We’re trying a new way of learning, a different way of using technology to bring families together, a better way of teaching creativity, to model ways of sharing and collaboration in the real world to our children. We’ve tried the absolute best we can to create a wonderful experience for you and your family. Please come and meet Felicity from Thin Air at http://sendfelicity.com.
Yours respectfully,
– Ian
Founder: Being Prudence
This looks wonderful, I would to try this, but I can’t find it in iTunes, what am I doing wrong? Is there a link to this that I can use?
What a great idea! I love it! Count me in!!
I don’t see the app on itunes. How do I join Send Felicity? It looks fabulous? Thanks.
Hi Everyone, thanks for your comments. I’ll invite Ian to respond, but from what I know, the advent portion is launching as the Send Felicity website, the app is coming a few days later after it’s through the Apple submission process. We’ll keep you posted.
Hello everyone, thank you SO much for your interest.
So let me explain a bit better. I’m sorry I wasn’t clear enough in the article.
The main aspect of what we’re trying to create is available from the sendfelicity.com website. It’s about creating a safe experience where families can find fun ideas to share, and collaborate and inspire each other with beautiful things made by themselves. We’re custodians in the sense of protecting people from spammers and other nasties, and kickstarters in the sense of providing a range of fun ideas for your to experiment with, both in terms of fun family activities – eg. “fancy dress for dinner”, and the craft activities – first one arriving this Saturday.
The magnificence of what can be created by shared children’s imaginations, plus families sharing their stories of what happened with various daily activies simply by comments on Facebook or via blogging/tweeting can’t be captured in one iPhone app.
At least not yet. And I wouldn’t want to try.
The iPhone app will be released sometime later and it will have another magic trick to inspire your children’s imaginations. We literally take their simple drawings and surprise with something very startling and beautiful using moving origami, made with real paper. My eleven year old daughter Grace contributed the spinning top, made out of paper. There’s some other lovely surprises. (For those of you who like steampunk, our intrepid sky pirate bunny pilots an origami steampunk airship with cupcake and toothpick wings.)
But the goal is to show your children something almost within reach, so that they’re inspired to drop the phone and go and play, and create something wonderful with their own hands and their own imaginations.
If you’re able to share photos of what we’ve inspired them to do via our special gallery, by following us on Twitter at @sendfelicity, or our Facebook page linked at sendfelicity.com – that would be wonderful. There are schools getting involved as well, as part of a huge worldwide cross-cultural exchange of arts and crafts. Anyone is welcome. Even grownups who’ll have their own special little section below the childrens images, if they’ve gone the super extra miles and made wonderfully inspiring work to show what’s possible using raw imagination.
We’re aiming to build a curated gallery that evolves over the month. It’s curated because we’re stopping potentially nasty people from attempting a free ride. But there is a very special magic trick on the same level as Santa (our conspiracy of fun) where your child will be adored and made special because of some effort between you, the parent and me, the crafter of something good using the ones and zeros.
So don’t please wait for the iPhone app. We’ll keep ready to launch later in the month. We also have some other lovely surprises later in the month besides the iPhone app for your children to inspire them further and help them understand that creativity is magical.
It’s all free. It’s all good. We have the best intentions at heart and you’ll be able to observe what we do very transparently.
I’ve put my own twitter account as the way to contact me because I think it’s an opportunity for people who use twitter to observe what I think. We live our lives very publicly these days in the digital world. Parents who want to check up on me are most welcome to look back month and months of my tweets to see the kind of person I am. I’m comfortable with that. Here it is again: http://twitter.com/ianchia
If you are so kind to join us and share what’s possible with your friends, together, we can all make something magnificent that’s far far bigger than what any of us can achieve alone.
All the best,
– Ian
Just amazing. Beautiful concept and design. Loving it already!