educational kids' games Archives

Detective Agency: The new Carmen Sandiego-style game from Osmo

We’re huge fans of Osmo around my house. The kids love to play their innovative games, and I love that they seamlessly marry tangible, hands-on play with screen time. So when I saw their new game just announced today, Detective Agency, is a Carmen Sandiego-style...

2 awesome new Cubetto accessories we’re geeking out about.

by Kate Etue | Tech Toys and Random Fun

Of all the STEM coding toys that have come through our door, our favorite has been Cubetto. Maybe it’s the heirloom quality of the robot’s square wooden housing, with a personable little smile on the front. Or the fact that they don’t have to steal...

Web coolness: Make money playing Fortnite, skin damage from your phone, and more!

by Cool Mom Staff | Link Roundups

Here are a few cool tech links from around the web. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did. Happy Pride! We love this Pride-themed charger from myCharge. Free Apple Camp registration opens at 10am today. Go! Bookmark these 45 podcasts you should be listening to. And...

Carmen Sandiego meets Cooking Mama, in this cool cooking game for kids

by Kate Etue | Fun Apps for Kids

News flash: our kids love video games. But they also love to help cook in the kitchen. So when we saw that the new Issa’s Edible Adventures app teaches them to cook virtually and IRL, we knew we had to try it out. It’s part Carmen Sandiego, traveling the...

Pixel Kit: It’s Lite-Brite for the 21st-century tech-savvy kid. And it’s awesome.

by Kate Etue | Tech Toys and Random Fun

If you were obsessed with Lite-Brite as a kid like I was, I bet you, er, your kids will love Pixel Kit, a new Lite-Brite-esque coding toy from Kano. It’s all the best of the quintessential ’80s toy, with the cool tech updates a 21st-century kid expects....

Sprite Box: Code Hour is our cool free app of the week.

by Kate Etue | Educational Apps For Kids

We love finding cool toys and apps that do a great job teaching our kids the basics of coding, since it’s a language we expect they’ll want (and need) to know when they’re adults. When they’ve got great design and fun play through too,...

12 of the coolest educational tech toys for kids | 2016 Tech Gift Guide

by Cool Mom Staff | Holiday Tech Gifts

Yay! We’re so happy to be back with our annual Cool Mom Tech Holiday Tech Gift Guide, all fresh and new for 2016. And to kick it off, we’ve got the coolest educational tech toys for kids of all ages. Whether you’re shopping for a curious preschooler...

Osmo Coding is screen time you can feel good about.

by Kate Etue | Tech Toys and Random Fun

I’m convinced the reason my kids keep going back to play Osmo, one of our favorite educational tools for kids, is its brilliant mashup of digital elements and tangible controls they can actually touch and move around on the table. If you’re not familiar...

Can you teach coding to preschoolers? Here are three toys that will try

by Christina Refford | Tech Toys and Random Fun

Coding is certainly one of the new buzzwords in education, along with STEM, STEAM, and now, believe it or not, STREAM. And while a lot of learn-to-code apps toys, and games, like Robot School, Dash Robot, and Code Master, are targeted primarily to grade-school kids,...

Our 11 coolest new tech toys of 2015: Editors best of the year

by Cool Mom Staff | Editors' Picks of the Year, Tech Toys and Random Fun

Okay, so this is the post in our editors’ top picks of the year series we know a lot of our readers have been waiting for: The coolest tech toys of 2015. There are so many amazing trends we’re seeing here: Coding is becoming more accessible to even...

Hi! We’re Kristen + Liz

Kristen Chase + Liz Gumbinner of Cool Mom Picks

We started Cool Mom Tech in 2010 to help make our increasingly digital lives easier, more organized, more meaningful, and more fun, however old your kids may be.

We love that it's grown to become the go-to source for millions of parents who want commonsense info about tech delivered with a smile.

We even have the privilege of sharing our tips + tricks with The TODAY Show, CNN, HLN, GMA, Nightline, newspapers and magazines around the country, and our favorite -- regular parents who stop us at PTA meetings and ask us how old kids need to be to get a smartphone, and whether they really need to panic about Snapchat.

(Answer: It's complicated.)

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