My child has been watching youtube for a while to be exposed to the English language. After 3 months with this she speaks better English than me. (I lived for two years in the USA.) Problem is that she now wants to watch youtube just for entertainment. She’s got to the point where she doesn’t learn much more from this. I’m trying to motivate her to learn to read, write and math, without success. So I though, the youtube watching could be a motivation for learning other stuff. The idea is that once in a while the youtube should pause, then some task should pop up, ie “what is 5+2?” or “type the word hello” (sound clips). When she has type the correct answer to a few of such questions, she’ll be able to resume her video.
Does anyone know of some software that provides such functionality?
My point was some kind of solution that pauses whatever she is watching, and she’ll need to do some task before she’ll be able to resume. Having a lot of educational games doesn’t really work as she has got into the mode where she just wants to sit and watch.
This is an issue - you can’t fix it.
My son has an ipad, and he has limited screen time on it - he must send me requests for extensions, sometimes I give him 30 or 60 minute extensions…
If you’re not physically managing them yourself, they’ll just end up vegetating watching some Malaysian moron streaming AmongUs for 8 hours a day.
We have Plex - so sometimes I tell him to watch something specific on there before he can have another ‘free time’.
Solutions are, as yet, not intelligent enough to avoid simple supervision…
But with screentime limits, he’s stuck unless I put in the password and enable extended time limits… so even when he’s away he must ask me for more ‘youtube’ time etc.
Temporary solution here is that she is not allowed to use the computer with charger connected. When battery runs out (80ish minutes), she will have to put the pc back in the cabinet for charging. If she forget to put it back her battery won’t be charged for next time she wants to use it. That limits the screentime at home.
However, we travel a lot (which was the motivation for learning english in the first place). 2000km drives are not unusual. I’d like her to be educated as well as entertained during those drives. And when getting stuck in hotel rooms, which has become very common during the past year, there is not really much else than a computer to explore.
What @Ben said: supervision is the answer to motivate her to do something else as you seem to be a victim of your own success!
There is no ready-made software that does exactly what you want, but this is Open Source, so you can make it do whatever you want!
E.G. you could reassign youtube.com, youtu.be, … whatever she’s familiar with to 127.0.0.1 in the /etc/host file using cron or at or any other scheduler and that way YouTube will only be available based on the rules you set for her in your own script. (1h daily, 5 minutes per hour, whatever).
Yeah, but the point is not to block her but rather “solve this and you’ll get to see more”.
Seems like I need to start programming. If I create a database of questions and answers, i could make a program that starts by sending media pause signal, pops up a dialog showing (and sounding) a random task. When propper answer is provided, the dialog goes away.
If this dialog is set to be always on top and a timer that makes it start every once in a while, this should be pretty much solved. Only thing is that it should not be possible to exit the dialog without providing the correct answer.
