linusekenstam

Thank you so much for this.

To be clear, Bedtimestories is just the beginning, its an easy target, and easy to market. Our mission is a lot bigger, we want to become "the narrative company" and are building the tools to make that happen.

Excited, and hope to have you and the wife and kids along for the ride!

/ Linus

There is a bit of all, content, publishers and self-served.

We already have +10.000 registered users (most signed up in the past 30 days)

About 20.000 stories are generated and some 50.000 images

We are releasing about 2000 books on Amazon with 10 stories per book, and pay royalties back to the creators of each story.

So there will be a lot of noise, essentially we are taking on the big fish.

Hey! that cool, actually, Bedtimestory.ai works in ANY language, just write the prompt in the language you want, and the story will get generated in that language, PURE magic.

We have not built out the full search, filter and categories for the library yet, but we have stories in +100 different languages.

Super excited to be sharing more in the next few months.

This is an interesting question. And I’m a bit biased, but I’m doing both. So I’m working remote for a company on the other side of the world. And I live in Barcelona, in the middle of the hectic @22 area, (BCN Silicon Valley) it’s kind of a joke, but that’s fine.

But earlier this year we bought a rural house in south-east Sweden. A modest little countryside dwelling. Completely off-grid. Relying on solar/wind and Private well.

Our plan is to spend our years like this - 1/3 in Barcelona, 1/3 in the country side dwelling and 1/3 of the year traveling. When we are not occupying our apartment or house we are renting them out. So we are basically living for free and get our travel tickets paid for by the income generated from renting our apartment/house.

In Barcelona we have 1000/1000mbits fiber. And in Sweden funny enough we also have fiber but “only” 300/300mbits.

I’m not sure for me personally if living 100% country or city would be something I’d like to do. I love the seasonal changes. And the getaways. So being a remote worker makes that possibly in a way a normal fixed office position simply can’t do.

Also it’s insane what you can get for the same amount of money if you compare and odd city to the countryside. Quality of life really increases with the veriety. At least from my perspective.

Ping me on Twitter if you want to chat more about this in person. @linusekenstam

and yes, obviously when they grasp the concepts, we move on to do robotics, lego, 3D printing, painting robots and so on, but getting the basics is the first step, then it's just like a waterfall. :-)

Hello!

We run an after school classes program in Barcelona, Spain. Where we teach kids from age 4-15 "programming" or computational thinking.

Depending on age group there are different tools, and starting with the really young ones, we use tools like Hopscotch and other simpler coding apps, when we use technology. And even more fun is to learn about coding not even using any tech. So then we revert to using pen/paper/strings and ourselves, programming each other is a fun thing to do, and you can debug the code in group, and learn to understand how computer operates, and how to give orders.

Once the kids get slightly older, we use to go straight to scratch, (this is the first stop we tend to go to regardless of age if anyone is new, just to grasp concepts) This will not take to long if the kids are older than 10.

But even from 6 years of age we've seen enormous potential in using scratch, kids love it, it's visual in the output, super versatile in what you can do (we get blown away by the kids all the time). And you can indeed build very complex things with scratch, as well as you can produce a pong game in matter of minutes.

Main take away, if you want the kids engaged, get them super comfortable in Scratch, and get them to understand problem solving using computational thinking, rather than go straight to the browser and manipulate the DOM, that's not learning kids how to code, thats like peeking and changing values, not really getting to the core of programming.

Once the kids are comfortable in understanding that one thing can be solved in more than 10 ways, and that no real way is the right way (except if it is). Than make an introduction to text based programming, either looking inside scratch code, or by looking at something in the visual spectrum, like processing, this is a great first step and good jump from scratch. And it's easy to build on top of this and move into javascript.

When I'm mentioning age groups it's only if they have zero prior knowledge about coding, we have 6 years old that program as good as 12 years old but the 6 year old kids have been doing it for a year or more and the 12 year olds are just a couple of weeks into classes.

So it's also about checking the temperature on knowledge. Once you start moving up the ladder on text based programming, it's important to understand how to keep the vast majority interested, and not just the .consoleLog(); persons interested. Keep in mind that programming comes in many shades, and not everyone is hard core math nerd loving, but still can be terrific problem solvers, if given the right tools to do so.

I would say the biggest take-away for us since starting KidsHackClub.com is that make sure it's fun, do not indulge in long demos, or make complex things, and show of big projects, it wont get the kids into coding, it will scare them away. So start small, and build up as time goes, and make things that are visual, no-one enjoys staring at lines of intigers counting in the console, sorry peps, it's kids from the touch generation, they have played with phones and tablets since they where born.

Would love to chat more, just hit me up on twitter @LinusEkenstam or @KidsHackClub and we can also do email, but ping me on Twitter and we can hook up.