WORLD BOOK KIDS published by World Book, Inc.
URL: https://www.worldbookonline.com/kids/home# (Access is available through both Tennessee and Arkansas State Libraries, and many more – check if your state library has access on its respective website, or by clicking the URL link above!) 💻🐛
- Summary – This digital encyclopedia is child-friendly, boasting an impressive number of entries on a wide variety of topics related in a simplified, but not superficial manner. There are games, crafts, and other activities that encourage young researchers to play while they learn.
- Target Audience – The target audience range for this site is ages 6-10. The content is wide, but the amount written in each entry is fairly sparce. The basic overviews would leave older researchers likely seeking more evidence for their school projects, and the simple matching/sorting games, puzzles, and do-at-home crafts clearly appeal to a younger crowd.
- Strengths and Weaknesses– World Book Kids provides an interactive and diverse range of content, divided into related topics, like animals, people, games, dictionary and more, with lots of audiovisual content to help guide navigation. The content itself is very thorough and provides multimedia results when searched, including outside source links for further research, sound clips, photos, illustrations, step-by-step guides, trivia and even Spanish language versions of the same World Book article. Users investigate and learn as they explore. However, this also means that many widgets like the “animal comparison feature”, search filters, and other accessibility features, including built-in screen readers require users to be able to decode this iconography on their own. A younger user may need a word read aloud to them, but unless they know to click the small 🔊 icon, the feature does them no good. Thus a strength for older/more experienced users may be a learning curve for younger/less experienced technology users.
- Creative Uses– There are many ways to “travel” or have different experiences through World Book Kids. One use might be to ask children to “take a trip” to a different country and bring back some facts about the environment and the culture, including but not limited to the kind of food people there eat, the holidays they celebrate, the nation’s capital and important landmarks or historic sites, as well as three fun things they’d want to do there. You could also host a World Book Kids Quiz Show, projecting their multiple choice trivia games on a pertinent topic (animals, history, science, english etc.) up on a shared screen, and allowing teams of players to “lock in their answers” with you and compete to see who will win this time around… Don’t be afraid to bring out your inner game show host!
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