Kika Gilbert wrote:

This weekend the New York Times featured a brilliant op-ed, "How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off,” by Adam Grant. It highlighted several values we work toward at Tinybop.

Books are powerful. They help kids translate and process the world around them. So, it's important for children to not only to feel included in picture books but also for books to make visible a range of stories. Here are some of our favorites.

In celebration of Computer Science Education Week and Hour of Code, we created some new machines in The Everything Machine and will show you how to make them, too.

As a company creating products in the kids’ media space, it’s always been important for us to engage all kids, both male, female, and in between. When it comes to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math), it’s especially important that we provide equal and diverse opportunities for all kids. This seems like a straightforward idea. But women still remain underrepresented in the sciences. While kids participate in STEAM activities more equally in the their early years of schooling, girls’ participation slowly decreases over time.

While our apps are digital, they take to heart the ethos of the maker movement. All of us at Tinybop grew up as tinkerers, as the kids constantly asking questions. We value learning through experimentation and curiosity, two ideas core to the maker movement, and we aim to embed those values within our apps.

This is why we’re looking forward to participating in the World Maker Faire, right in our backyard at the New York Hall of Science in Corona, Queens, this coming weekend, September 26th and 27th, 2015.

Since Tinybop’s inception, we’ve worked to make a difference in the lives of all kids. We believe in make-believe, curiosity, and tinkering as keys to developing lifelong learning and problem solving skills. And as a company that produces paid apps, we’ve thought deeply about how to spread our philosophy to all children to help close the digital divide.

We’re happily ringing in March for several reasons: it brings the promise of spring, National Pancake Day (today!), and it’s Women’s History Month.

In celebration of strong, intelligent women, we rounded up a few favorite apps, books, and videos from Tinybop Loves that have the power to inspire leadership, innovation, and perseverance in all kids.

We’re partnering with WIRED to host an afternoon of play. Please join us this Saturday, December 13th, at the WIRED Store in NYC for Nuts & Bolts, a hands-on experience for the whole family.

Seeing is believing, right? Well, actually, we rely on all of our senses to solve problems and figure out puzzles. As part of our nervous system, our senses of sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing work together to send snippets of information to the brain at rapid speed. Each one informs the other so we get the whole picture.

Grab a partner and put your senses to the test with this activity designed to reveal how your brain decodes signals from all the senses.

Our hearts are full of love (and blood!) this Valentine’s Day and we wanted to share another way to understand the ins-and-outs of the hardest working muscle in your body. Enjoy thinking about the science of your heart while your mind is occupied with warm and fuzzy thoughts this weekend.

Download this activity and see how blood flows through the heart and lungs to deliver nutrients to your whole body.

Here’s a whopper (no lie!) of a figure about the respiratory system: we breathe in and out, in and out, about 20,000 times a day.

Make a tiny model of an ever-active lung in our next activity (peek at past explorations of the digestive and skeletal systems). Just print, cut, fold, and puff – and prompt further questions on how our lungs and their little alveoli work.

We’re delighted to share that The Human Body has been awarded the 2014 KAPi for Best App for Older Children (5+). What an honor!

KAPi (Kids at Play Interactive) is an annual award granted by a panel of judges expert in interactive children’s media. The final picks are made based on a mix of design “innovation and excellence.” Past winners include some of our favorite toys and games, including Minecraft, Doodlecast, and Scratch. For the 2014 award, we’re proud to be included among great company.

When we set out to build The Human Body, we hoped the level of research, thinking, and care we poured into it would produce a fun, informative app for children and parents alike. Our thanks to KAPi and our amazing community of parents, educators, and kids for exploring The Human Body. We can’t wait to show you what’s next.

We’ve been longtime fans of CreativeMornings, a monthly breakfast and lecture series that began in Brooklyn in 2008. Local chapters have sprouted up all over the globe, hosting a range of sharp and fascinating speakers.

As you might gather, we’re very excited to announce that Raul, our founder and CEO, will speak at CreativeMornings NYC come January. The date hasn’t been set, but tickets go fast–they’re free! To stay in the loop and nab a seat, you can check the CreativeMornings NYC page (sign up for the mailing list to be the first to hear about tickets).

We hope to see you there!

UPDATE: new year, new slew of details! Raul’s talk is set for January 31st, 8:30 a.m., at the Galapagos Art Space. Sign-ups for free tickets open January 27th, 11:00 a.m.

Over the past few months we’ve received countless emails about every giggle, question, and aha! moment kids have discovered while playing The Human Body.

To stoke more of those questions and moments, we’re rolling out further explorations of the human body, system by system, to help your kids see anatomy in action with their own bodies. Up first are the skeletal and digestive systems. Help your child bend and (gently!) twist joints, sketch their meals, and examine the connection between the first bite of food and their next bathroom stop (yup, they can clock poops).

We’re sharing these in PDF form, so please feel free to print, share, and post your kids’ discoveries using the #tinybop hashtag. Eureka!

So far, you’ve learned why your bones need to be strong and how your muscles keep your body moving. What else goes on in your body that keeps your brain humming? Loads, of course–starting with even more facts to explore about the nervous system. As you dive into the nervous system, these links, and our handbooks, we’d love to hear from you about what you’re learning: send us a tweet @tinybop or share a photo on Facebook.

• Where do your dreams come from? How do your eyes remember to blink? There remain many unanswered questions about the brain.
• How do your neurons generate electric pulses? DiscoveryKids helps answer our questions!
• How do we know there are 100 billion neurons in the brain? Well, we don’t actually know for sure, but we’re close.
• Neuroscience for Kids, a site created by a University of Washington professor, is a great resource for curious minds.
• Although the eye is small, it is powerful at sensing light. The world record for seeing a far-away object is a distance of 1.6 km!
• We all think we know how our nervous system looks, but these microscopic images reveal how amazing it really is.
• Singing to Schoolhouse Rock! is always the most fun way to learn. Listen to “Telegraph Line,” about the nervous system.

We’re gearing up to create a new handbook for our next app, and we’d love to hear your feedback on The Human Body Handbook.

Have you read it with your child? Did you share it among your students? Is there something else you’d like to learn? We want to help!

Here’s a short, 10-minute survey to give us a better understanding of how our handbooks are being used. If you leave your email, we’ll send you a special thank you for participating.

We’re proud that our apps are available in 50 languages, as it means we can share our love of science and exploration all over the world. However, we still need your help to improve our translations, translate new vocabulary for future apps, and get our handbooks in shape for many more languages.

So far, we’ve received several offers from parents, teachers, and entire classrooms alike (one class even translated _The Human Body _ as a collaborative project!). The process is fast: we share a list of words (about 300) to be translated. Once we have the translated list, we use it in the next release of the app.

If you’d like to contribute your language and translation skills to the Tinybop community, please email us at support@tinybop.com.

We hope you’ve been enjoying diving into The Human Body! If you or your kids are anything like us, you’re always hungry for more facts and information. Our handbook is a great resource for learning more, but the amount of information we gathered was busting at its virtual seams. So, following our roundup of skeletal system links, here’s what you need to know about muscles!

• Always a helpful jumping-off point, Wikipedia’s entry on the muscular system is extremely thorough. It’s also a bit more technical, so it’s perfect for kids looking to flex their impressive memorization skills.
• There are over 30 muscles in your face that help you show emotions—something we learned from Discovery Kids’ resource on “Your Muscle System.”
• Asking the question, “What is the strongest muscle in the human body?,” has a few answers as Kyle Hill, author of Science-Based Life, teaches us.
• Between our 206 bones and 650 muscles working together, there’s still plenty that can go wrong. This article by KidsHealth looks at the changes that can affect these two systems in our teenage years.
• If your muscles didn’t work in pairs, you’d move once and then be stuck forever! Here’s a fun interactive GIF by the BBC that demonstrates the importance of muscular pairs.

When we set out to create The Human Body, we wanted it to be the jumping off point for discovery, exploration, and most importantly—tons of questions. Luckily, from what we've heard from our community, the app has become just that and we're learning about the many ways The Human Body is used by kids (and adults) of all ages.

In addition to the app, we created The Human Body Handbook to arm parents and teachers (and older siblings and grandparents) with extra resources to support kids in their learning. During our research phase, we discovered oodles of great resources—too many to print! So, we've decided to share them, moving system by system, as a round up on the blog every week.

First up: the skeletal system.

- Medulla oblonga…what? A deep dive into the human skeleton, Britannica has a thorough article full of interesting facts. This one is definitely for kids interested in the science of the skeleton, what it's made of, and plan on winning a human body trivia competition in the future.

- Here's a crazy idea to consider: What if all animals had human skeletons? This video exposes how complicated our skeleton is, and also, just how freaky it would be if everything in the animal kingdom had our bone structures.

- What, exactly, is the knee bone connected to? In Them Not So Dry Bones, Schoolhouse Rock! performs a fun song to help us remember how all of those bones stay connected (and provides super nostalgic learning moments for some of us at Tinybop HQ).

- Growing pains? Bones, Muscles, and Joints by KidsHealth takes a distinctively kids-eye view on all of the changes a skeleton will go through as it grows.

We'll be back very soon with more about the muscular system.