Why we’re spending the COVID-19 crisis making free activity books for kids
We had just set up as a company when COVID-19 hit. While the idea had been percolating for a while (read: several years) we came back from 7 months travelling and decided to try the business for real – use the 6 months savings we had to spend on creating our first product and seeing if there was a viable market for it. Then, a pandemic hit. Of the industries that were and are the hardest hit is travel, the field our business was in.
Time for a rethink.
We call ourselves a travel education business, because other terms don’t really fit. We want to help people learn more about the places they travel to, simply because we believe they’ll have a better time if they do. In our experience, if you know about a place before you arrive there you travel differently. You make different choices about where to go (usually avoiding the overcrowded and overburdened tourist hotspots), you talk to locals more, and differently and you remember it better when you get home. Rather than ‘learning on the go’ once you arrive and constantly playing catch-up, if you understand some of the basics about a country – some history, a little culture, something about the issues that locals currently face – you travel more ethically automatically. So our idea was to create travel guide-magazines designed for that purpose. Rather than recommending hotels or restaurants to Top Sights to instead give people a fun, informative introduction to what they should know before they go.
Of course, we could still do this in lockdown. People will still want to learn things and read about different countries when they’re stuck at home, perhaps even more so. But in order to make the business viable, we also planned to work with travel companies – helping them create content specific to their locations, brainstorm on how best to achieve a redistribution of tourists. And now the travel industry is struggling to survive. There isn’t anything extra for in-depth content for educated and interested travellers. There is just survival. So, we’ve had to pivot.
Instead, we decided quickly to spend our time doing something worthwhile, that would help out parents at home adapting to a new reality. We had always wanted to eventually branch into guides for children, so why not start now? A month ago we started offering free activity workbooks for kids. Each one is themed on a different country, starting with England, then Iceland, Japan, Brazil, Morocco, Jamaica, Ireland and most recently France.
The kids workbooks link into our initial idea – they’re designed to help kids learn about the world as well as encouraging them to begin small research tasks. We want kids to learn about the world just as much as we want adults to learn about the world. We also want to push kids to learn about countries they might not know much about. Our Japan and Brazil guides include traditional stories and our Iceland guide has a section on mythical Icelandic creatures. Each workbook starts with a map that kids have to navigate around to get a clue.
Watch a video here:
Coming soon!
The workbooks have been pretty popular – more than 1,000 downloads for the first month, starting from nothing. Now, at the end of month 2, we’re at over 2,500 downloads. We’ve had some great feedback from people and their kids.
“My daughter Pia had a total blast having to find out the word KIMONO. Please do send us the next destination. Thanks for making our stay at home travels more fun. ”
“These are a very welcome addition to the materials we use to keep the children entertained! Well done! I’ve signed up for future editions directly on the website.”
“My little girl has really enjoyed these booklets. She will be 9 in July and they are pitched so well for her levels of understanding, curiosity & attention span. ”
We’ve made 8 workbooks so far:
England
Iceland
Japan
Brazil
Morocco
Jamaica
Ireland
France
This week is the first time we’ve taken a break, to take a step back and redesign the website, as well as identifying our way forward. We’ve learned a lot through iterating - both what is popular with the kids as well as what we can reasonably produce in one week.
We plan to keep going and are currently planning our next workbook - to Australia!