When I decided to put my travel activity packs online, I knew one thing from the beginning: I didn’t want to build another website full of adverts, pop-ups and distractions for children.
I wanted something different — child-centred travel activities designed around play, learning and imagination, while leaving the website itself firmly in the parents’ hands.
But the idea of turning these activities into something bigger actually started much earlier, on a sunny afternoon at a playground.
The moment I realised the idea could work
I was at a playdate with my youngest daughter. Another mum and I were sitting on a bench talking while the girls ran wild around the playground. The afternoon sun was warm, and we were both relaxing.
‘I tried your travel activities pack,’ she started the conversation.
‘Really? That’s cool. How was it? Did your girls like it?’ I couldn’t help myself. I got excited, was already sitting up straighter and listening intently.
‘Yes! They started doing it in the car on our way to their grandparents and didn’t stop until halfway there. You know how far my parents live — it’s a five-hour drive. I suddenly realised I could listen to music and talk to my husband for such a long time. I couldn’t believe it!’
We both laughed.
Parents know how often conversations seem to happen in fifteen-minute instalments because, somehow, Mum is always needed for various reasons.
‘That’s fantastic! I am so happy they liked it.’ I was beaming with pride.
Then she asked:
‘Are you planning to put it online? More parents could use it. Maybe you could even turn it into a business,’
That sentence stayed with me for months.
For the first time, I had encouraging real-world feedback that the activities could genuinely keep children engaged. They were playful, but there was educational value hidden inside them too.
And I started wondering whether this little travel solution I had created for my own family could help other families as well.
Why I decided against advertising to children
Once I seriously considered putting the activities online, I had another decision to make.
The obvious digital route would have been to create an interactive website for children, monetise it with advertising and encourage them to keep clicking and playing.
But that wasn’t my vision.
I had been reading about children’s relationship with advertising, including guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The research suggests that children aged seven and under have a limited ability to understand the persuasive intent behind advertising. Older children gradually become better at recognising that intent, particularly with parental guidance, but recognising advertising doesn’t necessarily make it easy to resist.
That reinforced something I already felt strongly about.
I didn’t want advertising to be part of the experience.
So I made a simple decision:
No ads. No unnecessary distractions. No endless searching.
The activities should be ready to print or easy to use offline. There should be enough content to keep a child happily occupied without overwhelming them with endless choices.
Most importantly, although the activities are for children, the website itself is designed for parents.
What child-centred design means to me
Parents are busy.
We often want activities with educational value, but finding something that children actually want to do is another matter entirely.
I didn’t want playtime to feel like schoolwork.
That was where the character-based approach seemed to work particularly well.
Instead of presenting children with a collection of unrelated exercises, I could give them a theme and turn the entire activity pack into one coherent mission.
There was a teddy, a princess, a dragon, a dinosaur and even an axolotl.
My own children quickly joined the development team by listing more characters they would happily go on adventures with.
The learning could then happen inside the story.
A maths problem could become part of a mission. A logic exercise could reveal a clue. A pattern could help a character find the right path. A writing activity could become a comic-book conversation.
The child sees an adventure.
The parent sees the educational value underneath it.
Creating activities for different ages
The next challenge was difficulty.
Creating activity packs for a four-year-old and a nine-year-old was one thing. Putting them online meant thinking much more carefully about children across the entire age range from three to twelve.
So, the brainstorming began.
I went back through the books we had used over the years. I looked through my children’s schoolbooks, our favourite board games and the maths and logic competitions my child had taken part in.
I listed different activity types, thought about which ones had worked particularly well for us and began experimenting with how they could be adapted for different ages.
I also used AI to help brainstorm ways of adjusting the difficulty between age groups.
It wasn’t a case of asking AI for an answer and accepting whatever appeared.
Quite the opposite.
There were plenty of suggestions I didn’t think were appropriate, useful or interesting enough. I questioned them, changed them and kept refining the activities.
After all, AI could generate ideas, but I had something it didn’t: years of real-life experience playing, learning, travelling and solving problems with my children.
That judgement mattered most.
Eventually, I felt ready.
Ready to launch the activities online, let other families try them and continue learning from their feedback.
Because that is really what child-centred design means to me: not creating more digital noise for children, but creating something thoughtful enough that they actually want to use it.