Things worth a child's attention
A nine-year-old has, on a school day, something like ninety minutes between the front door and tea. A great many people have built things to fill that gap, and most of them are paid by how much of it they can take.
We would like to be paid, when we are paid, for something else — for the hour being better spent than it would have been otherwise. That is the whole brief. Anything published under this name has to leave the child knowing a thing they did not know, or able to do a thing they could not do, and hand the ninety minutes back with something in them.
Four things we decided
There is no streak. We built one, early on, and took it out. A counter that resets when a child misses a Tuesday is not measuring what the child knows; it is measuring how afraid they are of the counter. Nothing we make will have one.
Every article has to answer one question before it goes up: what could a child tell you afterwards? Not "it was fun" — the actual thing. Why a square spiral looks like a G on a screen. Why bread rises. If we cannot write the sentence, the article is not finished.
No advertising to children, in anything, under this name. The library carries none. Whatever comes after it will carry none. The way to pay for a thing is to charge for it, and we will do that plainly rather than sell a child's afternoon to somebody else.
The grown-up gets the facts on the front. What a thing costs, if it costs anything. What it collects, if it collects anything. Who publishes it and where they are. Not in a settings menu three taps down — on the page you are reading before you decide.
What exists so far
BrightKidz Library
A library for children aged 7 to 12: science, nature, space, code, history, and things you can go and make with what is in the kitchen drawer. Every picture is drawn by us. Most articles come with something to try, and there are browser games and short books alongside them.
The library is free. It carries no advertising, needs no account, and collects nothing — no name, no email, no reading history.
There is also an Android app with the whole library packed inside it, so it works on a car journey or in a house with no signal. On Google Play it is still listed under the library's older name, BrightKidz Hub — renaming it would cost a release we would rather spend on new pages. It is the same library.
What comes next
More than one thing, eventually, and not all of it will be free. Drawing every picture and keeping a library working on old phones costs money, and we would rather charge you an honest price for a thing than fund it any other way. When something is paid, the price will be the first fact you see about it. When something is not, we will say so about that thing — and only that thing.