Read our interview with the artist behind The Monsters, Tianhua Mao, in English or Chinese.

我们采访了怪物之门的艺术家毛天骅。以下是中英文的采访全录。

In our newest app, The Monsters, kids create all kinds of creepy, horrible, wretched monsters.

We'll be writing about everything from education to design, technology to production, community to kids and parenting.

On one of our favorite sites, The Kid Should See This, our friend Rion shares kid-friendly videos that are also entertaining and educational for us grownups. Here, she's hand-picked six about engineering just for us.

In a few short years, Tinybop has grown from a team of three to 20+. We’ve released seven apps and have more in the works. As we’ve grown, we’ve adopted new tools so everyone can keep up with projects.

At Tinybop, we tend to think that STEM and creativity are always linked. But here are some links (ha!) about both for reading, exploring, and playing.

As we dug into all of the incredible ways our planet changes over time for our newest app, The Earth, we became particularly interested in volcanoes. The more we learned, the more we wanted to know. Some of what we uncovered made it into the app and handbook. Here are a few things we (reluctantly!) had to leave out:

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.

Our newest app, The Earth, lets kids discover our dynamic planet: from its fiery core to frozen glaciers. While we make sure to get the facts right in every Explorer’s Library app, we like to take a good look at all sides of a subject’s story. As Sarah Jacoby notes in her interview, fiction also plays an important role in helping us bring our apps to life.

Here are a few of our favorite finds, both informational and fantastical, from our dig into our planet:

The illustrator who created the artwork for our newest app, The Earth (which we think is pretty gorgeous; we’re biased but we’re not the only ones), has drawn for the New York Times, Travel + Leisure, and Pitchfork. On top of all that, she joins us at Tinybop HQ every day as a production designer. Here, the talented (if we do say so ourselves) Sarah Jacoby shares a little bit about her process, inspiration, and of course, her favorite kids’ books.