Top 6 Tech Toys at CES 2023: Toys to Give Your Child a Digital Leg Up

Top 6 Tech Toys at CES 2023: Toys to Give Your Child a Digital Leg Up

With rapidly evolving technology dominating life and work, children need a way to seek mastery of digital skills before they need them. All of these toys help engage children in non-passive activities. They give children the opportunity to program, read, engage emotionally, play with their peers, and imagine the world, and the universe, in new ways.

Over the next several months, look for stories and reviews of these and other toys as Serious Insights explores the value and impact of these learning experiences on the children in my family.

Miko 3

Miko 3 is the interactive robot aimed at entertaining and educating children. Miko 3 was launched in 2021. Miko’s rugged ABS body will hold up to the play of its 5-10-year-old audience. Dual MEMs microphones allow Miko to hear children, while its wide-angle HD cameras give Miko vision. A high-resolution IPS display brings Miko and its associated content into the world. The Miko robot is fully mobile on its rubberized wheels. It tracks movement through odometrical sensors.

The Miko robot offers 50,000+ hours of premium content, including experiences from Disney and Paramount.

“Bringing the imaginative worlds of Disney and Pixar to our platform represents a big step in kids robotics,” said Sneh Vaswani, Miko co-founder and CEO. “Miko is thrilled to be the first robotics platform to have such an innovative collaboration with Disney, and we look forward to raising the benchmark for kids’ engagement together.”

Miko was selected as the only Asia-based startup participant in Disney Accelerator, a program that connects technology companies with the expertise and resources of The Walt Disney Company. Miko has become the first company to host an official Disney app on a children-oriented robot platform.

The Disney additions to Miko’s content library include audiobooks and read-along stories with animated visuals, including Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Zootopia,” “Tangled,” and Disney and Pixar’s “Ratatouille” stories.

Miko 3 is a kidSAFE+ COPPA Certified, Mom’s Choice-Award winning robot.

Serious Insights appreciates the wealth of learning content but also the emotional intelligence of the Miko robot. While it may have “artificial emotions” to children, a smile is still a smile.

For more information, visit www.miko.ai.

WowWee Dog-E

Dog-E is a smart, app-connected robot dog with life-like movements, audio sensors to hear sounds, sensors on its head, nose and sides of its body to feel touch, and a tail that communicates via icons and messages. Turning on Dog-E starts a bonding process. An all-white pup comes to life through the minting process, which reveals its unique colors and characteristics. The minting process can begin by petting its head, touching its nose, or playing with it, among many other interactions.

The Dog-E companion app allows multiple members of a family to mint and save their own individual profiles in a single Dog-E. Each member of the family can have a Dog-E profile with its own unique look and personality, which they can seamlessly switch between each person using the app. With so many personalities available, some Dog-Es will love resting time, while others might always be hungry; some will be cute and shy, while others might be feisty and playful!

By using the app, you can train your Dog-E to learn names, and program movements, plus teach it tricks like giving kisses, singing, and responding to claps. Dog-E will let you know when it’s hungry, wants love, and when it wants to play—each in unique ways, depending on its personality profile. 

Dog-E is available for pre-order at https://dog-e.com Pre-order customers will receive a bonus accessory pack of 4 collars in various colors exclusively for your Dog-E. Additional WowWee products can be found here.

Onanoff StoryPhones

Headphones typically connect to a content source and play a passive role. They act as the endpoint for streaming music, the audio track of television shows and films, and/or the plot of a new audiobook. But what if headphones became an experience themselves? What if they became a companion to a reading experience, creating more active engagement?

Those are the questions that children’s headphone maker Onanoff asked. The result is StoryPhone, an interactive headphone system that uses small disks placed over the earcups to download stories directly to the headphones. Children rotate the disk to control the experience.

StoryPhones launched with a Disney collaboration in the last quarter of 2021. Stories available include many of Disney’s most beloved characters, such as Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, The Little Mermaid, Frozen, Lion King, Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc., and more. Disney adventures for StoryPhones launched 7 countries (IT, ES, AT, CH, DE, UK, FR) in 5 different languages (IT, ES, DE, FR, EN).

Missing a grandparent or parent? StoryPhones also offer the option of recording your own stories, in your own voice, through the mobile app, creating a customized StoryShield called PlayShield. This way, users can record family stories and share the ones that shaped them with generations to come. It’s also a brilliant way to stay connected with loved ones far away. Even though grandma lives in another country, a child can hear a bedtime story read in her voice. Parents can soothe their children with a lullaby sung in their voice when they need to be away.

StoryPhones incorporate existing Onanoff technology, including SafeAudio^® to protect children’s hearing.

For more on StoryPhones visit Onanoff.

Learning Resources Space Rover™

Space Rover helps children grasp coding by programming the Space Rover to go on adventures. The open-ended play model encourages independent learning and the acquisition of skills such as critical thinking, sequential logic, and problem-solving.  Space Rover starts with simple instructions that follow a step-by-step approach to programming. It is designed for coders ages 4+.

The Space Rover Deluxe Coding Set includes a coding rover, astronaut, space rock and a mission handbook with space facts and 20 amazing coding challenges. Discover coding challenges and space facts in the activity guide, or kids can design their own adventures with the 51-piece playset.

 Space Rover Deluxe Coding Set will be available in Summer 2023 for $49.99 (single SKU) or $69.99 for a classroom set.

For more information, visit LearningResources.com.

Unistellar eQuinox 2 Telescope

I have been a backyard astronomer since my teens. I spent a lot of cold nights in the backyard with my reflector telescope pointed at the sky, trying to find a planet or a nebula. My little finder scope never seemed to align, and the quest for power left me with a limited field of view. And my neck didn’t appreciate the crick it received as I tried to squash my body down far enough to peer into the Barlow Lens-enhanced eyepiece. I usually ended up just enjoying the moon.

But I persevered. Now I enjoy the sky from the Nasa app and its images from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes.

There is something to be said about learning how Galileo looked up at the night sky—but you know real astronomers don’t do it like that anymore. Computers help them figure out where to point their telescopes, and digital displays remove the need to squish bodies down so eyes can peer into lenses.

Unistellar now brings that technology to the backyard with eQuinox 2. The eQuinox 2 takes a picture of the sky and identifies its location. An app lets the astronomer select what to look at. The automated telescope swings around to the target. Simply look at an iPad to see the sky. And if the target object proves too faint for the human eye, the Unistellar camera will take multiple exposures to build up an image.

What to join a community of nighttime explorers? Joining Unistellar’s community of more than 10,000 global citizen astronomers, the eQuinox 2 allows anyone to participate in missions and contribute directly to cutting-edge science in partnership with leading professional organizations, including the SETI Institute and NASA. From detecting asteroids visited by NASA’s Lucy mission to observing the impact of the DART planetary defense drill and identifying new worlds orbiting around distant stars, the Unistellar network is already playing an important role in citizen astronomy.

The eQuinox 2 smart telescope will retail for $2,499, with pre-sales starting January 3 and global availability in early 2023.

Available at www.unistellar.com. 

ROYBI’s RoybiVerse

Learning robot maker ROYBI is taking its learning experiences into the metaverse with its own interactive environment designed to create virtual learning experiences. RoybiVerse will offer digital experiences for children K-12 and on into college. In the ROYBI model, every member, from tutors to learners, takes control of their membership and content. Incentivized help engages them to continue learning, earning, and interacting. The RoybiVerse creates experiences where users fulfill learning needs for each other supported by the ecosystem.

Everything built in the RoybiVerse is VR enabled/compatible.

ROYBI is looking to build partnerships to expand the content offerings in the RoybiVerse.

RoybiVerse will likely act as a model for other virtual learning experiences. Serious Insights forecasts that many virtual “metaverses” will evolve with those that accumulate strong content partnerships, listen to their customers about experiences, and open themselves to multiple hardware platforms, proving to the early leaders in this space. RoybiVerse will offer children an early way to acclimate to what will become some portion of their life and work experience over the next several years.

For more on the RoybiVerse see ROYBI’s blog here.

Two more top tech toys for good measure

I wanted to add two more toys to the list, one that offers more advanced programming and another, a cube, that tells stories while it’s being cuddled.

For more serious insights on CES 2023, click here.

All photos are courtesy of the manufacturer unless otherwise noted.

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