Google is revamping some of its most popular and successful products to be suitable for a younger generation.
The company is currently working on adapting products so that they would be more safer and more enjoyable for under 12s. The likes of Chrome and YouTube will be reexamined to see what can be done to make them more child-friendly.
The news was revealed by Google’s vice president of engineering Pavni Diwanji in an interview withUSA Today. The idea is to look at technologies they are already using at home and at school and make them
There will surely be no question of dumbing down the products. Diwanji herself wrote in a Google blog post earlier this week: “As the mom of two girls, I know that technology is a pathway for their future success. Still, even as coding becomes more important, less than 1 percent of high school girls say they’re interested in pursuing computer sciences in college. But I’m also an engineer, so I’ve seen firsthand how exciting CS can be.”
As someone who claims that she “fell in love with code early”, it would be very strange if she, and Google, were to lock down its products and discourage creativity and exploration. Indeed the post itself was to promote a Google Education Project in the US called Made with Code, which encourages young girls to animate the state and territory trees in the President’s Park.
Ideas will be tested out on the kids of actual Google staffers at a specially adapted centre called the Kids Studio at the company’s headquarters, which brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “Google Generation”.
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