KidCoach - questions for kids

What is KidCoach app?

KidCoach helps parents and teachers stimulate children's thinking and communication skills. It contains hundreds of categorised questions with supporting educational notes in a flash-card format.

Parents can use these questions to inspire an educational conversation at any time, such as journeys to school or at home in the evening. Teachers will find them useful inspiration for lesson-related classroom discussions and debates.

What we love about KidCoach.

In many of our reviews and parent guides, we highlight the importance of talking with children about the educational apps they use. Conversations promote deeper thinking, embed knowledge, and build communication skills.

The barriers to these dialogues are time and thinking of topics. KidCoach can't add extra hours into your day, but its notifications, support, and ready availability remind you to use the time you have. Often that's all you need to find the time.

KidCoach comes into its own by inspiring your conversations with kids. It isn't easy to think of talking points daily that don't quickly become regurgitations of previous chats—hence the perenially unsatisfactory kids' responses to "What did you learn at school today?".

This question is too vague, too repeated, and too uninspiring. KidCoach's questions address specific skills, hook directly to a thought process, and are genuinely interesting to deliberate. They'd have been helpful as standalone questions, but their multiple talking points, ideas for going further, and extra guidance make the service KidCoach provides valuable. Over time, the app also learns which questions to recommend for kids to try next.

What skills does it improve?

KidCoach addresses thinking and communication skills through conversation starters within three broad categories: talk, think, and feel. These split into further sub-topics: creativity, critical thinking, philosophy, leadership, empathy, analytics and more.

What age is it appropriate for?

Kids aged between 6 and 12 are the perfect audience for the questions in this app. Some talking prompts require skills that younger children might not have, but many of the questions are mouldable by parents and teachers to match their kids' abilities—a process supported by the in-app notes.

Is KidCoach easy to use?

KidCoach supports browsing and searching. If you know the skill you want to work on with your child, you can use the categories to find relevant questions. For times when you'd like to find something generally interesting but don't have anything in mind, you can browse for a question that you think might resonate with your child.

When you find questions you like, you can favourite them, and return to them quickly.

How will students benefit?

Children won't use KidCoach directly but will benefit from the effective mental exercise of discussing the question and associated points. Some of the questions relate to school subjects, like mathematics, and they will refresh their understanding and practise applying their knowledge in a different context. They'll also get to enjoy conversing with their parents in an intellectually stimulating manner.

How will teachers benefit?

Teachers might not need KidCoach's question-recommendation feature, but they may find that the app helps them overcome those times when their minds draw a blank. The tags showing which skills each question addresses are a good starting point for finding the ones that match lessons or topics.

The questions' supporting notes provide a good start, and teachers can build upon them further to construct lessons around them.

How will parents benefit?

Parents want to support their kids' education but don't always have the confidence and experience to do it as they would like. When KidCoach's questions aren't openended, such as number-based ones, they are accompanied by explanations and answers. For more philosophical questions, parents get the aid they need to help their child through the initial consideration and extend them further.

While the app contains hundreds of questions, with more added regularly, it helps parents pick the right ones for their children. Tags show which skills each question addresses. When each conversation draws to an end, parents rate the conversation so that the app can suggest the best questions to move on to next time.

What can KidCoach improve on?

KidCoach does what it sets out to do, and the app performs flawlessly. Every app can have extra features added but is always at the risk of distracting from the contents or adding unnecessary complexity.

The one feature that might add to KidCoach is a print option that lets you print questions and supporting text in a print-friendly format. Screens can distract kids even when in the hands of adults, so having their notes on paper might be beneficial for parents and teachers in some circumstances.

How much does KidCoach cost?

When you open KidCoach for the first time, the app asks you to create an account and immediately gives you a two-week trial. This process is different from those of typical subscription apps—you aren't asked to hand over any payment details, nor does the trial roll over into a paid subscription.

After two weeks, you can choose to start paying for continued access to the app. If you do nothing, you don't pay—this is unusual and refreshingly consumer-friendly compared to apps where forgetting to cancel leaves you making payments you may not wish to continue.

What is included with the free version vs. paid?

If you choose not to continue with your subscription to KidCoach, rather generously, the app only reduces the content you can access rather cut you off completely. 

Is KidCoach safe to use?

Adults are KidCoach 's target users, but all of the questions, supporting text, and images viewed during this review of KidCoach were suitable for children to view.

There are no advertisements in the app. The app does contain sharing features to pass on users' favourites to their contacts, but this is not a problem in an educational app designed for parents and teachers rather than kids.

Overall rating of the app.

Don't feel that you should be able to start educational and thought-provoking conversations with kids effortlessly. Using an app to get you going does not reflect any shortcomings on your part. If you're a teacher, you'll know that starting with a blank slate is hard. If you're a parent, be reassured that teachers plan their classroom discussions from beginning to end—this app helps you make a similar preparation. Parent or teacher, you'll find KidCoach a valuable tool to bring out the best in your kids' thinking.

You can download KidCoach - questions for kids on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the KidCoach - questions for kids app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.