Kids & Chores
Finding the perfect chore app.
My wife wanted a simple way for our three kids to check off their chores each day. For years she would make a printout for each kid so they could check off their daily chores. Every few months a new one would need to be made to match their new responsibilities.
After a while we decided to find an app that could be used instead. We went through a number of apps. A few of them really stood out. But a common issue with all of them was they were phone based. Our kids do not have phones. For them to check off their chores they would need to come to us and borrow our phone. This was not easy or convinent for us or our kids. Because of this each app soon became more of a hinderance than a support of our daily routine.
Another issue that we ran into with all of the apps was were too advanced. Many of the chore apps on the market have a focus on earning money or points. The kids would get points for each chore and build up an allowance. While this seems like a good opertunity to teach finances to kids, for us it just added one more thing. The chores that our kids do are things that need to get done and for our family we dont feel that these chores need a money aspect. So having these extra features wasn’t helping and making the actual tracking more difficult.
Meet Skylight - the first real replacement for paper chore charts.
This search for simplicity led my wife to a great product from Skylight.
This product checked off many of the features she wanted
- A simple chore chart
- A calendar that was easy to see
- Would show family pictures when not in use (photo display)
- BIG - it is a 15 inch touchscreen display.
- SIMPLE SIMPLE SIMPLE
The goal of this product is to make calendars, chores, and photos as simple as possible. It took her only a few minutes to get it setup and working. I would recommend this product to anyone that wants a simple easy to setup solution that gives a clean view of your calendar and chores.
There were a few downsides to the Skylight.
It was not the most responsive device. When checking off chores there was a noticable delay. This often caused my kids to start clicking over and over on the same item.
Also everything needed to go through the Skylight service. The calendar could be linked to Google Calendar but instead of viewing it as a shared calendar it merged in the events to the Skylight calendar. This meant you couldn’t directly manage the calendar on the device.
The Photos also needed to be uploaded to the Skylight service to view them on the display. This added one more point for us to manage.
Because of these downsides it got me thinking that I could do much better than this. Thus started my journey to create my own solution that checked all those requirements that my wife had.
- It would show our family calendar and allow us to view it together at the dinner table. An natively showed our Google calendars.
- It had a chore chart that our 3 year old could understand and use without supervision and help.
- Would show family pictures when not in use that could load directly from Google Photos.
- BIG - was a 15 inch touchscreen display
- SIMPLE SIMPLE SIMPLE
I then added a few requirements of my own.
- It was portable and didn’t have to be plugged in. This was one of my complaints with the Skylight. It had to be plugged in and was heavy to move around. It was designed to be placed on the wall or table and left there.
- It was POWERFUL!!! - I wanted a computer or tablet that could be used for more than just calendar and chores. The kids use all kinds of apps for school. I wanted this to be something we could use as a family computer.
- I wanted it to be able to run some of our most used programs. Paprika, YNAB, and Home assistant