Anybody that has read a few entries of this blog knows that I have a passion for the Kindle Fire! I was downright ecstatic when I got the email about the new 50 dollar tablets, as I think this could be a huge help to so many kids who could benefit from the amazing Whispersync technology of books that are audio and highlighting enabled. Plus the thing is a snappy full blown tablet as well, and has enough solid e-learning apps to make it a viable alternative to the expensive iPads. So I’ve been working on optimizing our Mystery Island Coding Quest for the Fire tablets, and hope to be done with that shortly! I tried out Code.org and a Tynker tutorial on the 7 inch Kindle, and they were miserable. The only programming app I could find for the Fire was Lightbot, which is cool, but that just isn’t enough. I know iPad has such huge penetration in schools that Amazon is swimming up a waterfall here, but I sure hope they have a well organized and funded education division that plans on taking them head on! Especially with their 8 inch model, these tablets should be an easy sell if they have the right content.
And I’m just optimistic enough to think that Monster Coding should be one of those apps, so in the meantime I’m going to work away at getting our tutorial to look great on the our 2 Fire tablets. My 8 inch hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll post screenshots from both when I can. Nothing against iPads either - my kids still use our iPad all the time, and some of those IOS apps are so buttery smooth that you feel like HTML5 is pure hackery. But while that level of smoothness is hard to achieve, technology is getting better, and the new Silk browser is a huge improvement for HTML5 apps. I do hope they bring back the fullscreen option soon though…
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