Do you have kids that get an allowance? Then I have just the app for you.
ChoreMonster is blowing my mind.
Before ChoreMonster, our 10-year old and 8-year old would get an allowance every Sunday. They had chores they were supposed to do, and usually the did them throughout the week, but not always. And of course, not with a happy attitude about it.
Since we work hard at Dragon Army to understand the science of gaming (or, “gamification”) and how it applies to experiences we build for our clients, I decided to give ChoreMonster a chance.
ChoreMonster gamifies chores. And it freaking works.
For the past three weeks my boys have been using ChoreMonster. Here’s how it works:
You set up an account for your child. They can either use your phone or their own (my boys have old iPods they use.) You then create a list of chores and an associated point value. I broke down the chores I wanted my sons to do and made it equal in points to the amount of allowance they should receive. For example, 500 points = $5.
When your child completes a chore, they go into the app and mark it as complete. Then, not only do they get their points added to their total, but they also get a ticket for every chore completed. They can then spin a prize wheel with each ticket to see if they unlock a new monster. This monster is nothing more than a cute card that is added to their collection, but that’s enough for my boys to go nuts over it.
You can decide to let the child automatically complete a chore or require your approval before it is marked complete.
A feature I like is the ability to give random points when you want, if they do something that you feel should be rewarded.
The first time I set it up for my 10-year old, his first reaction was, “this seems dumb.” Then, 30 seconds later, he announced he was going to do some chores and see how this thing works. Now, he loves it.
I have told my boys that they can now earn their allowance in 4 days, or 12 days, but that when they earn it, they will get it. I love that they are learning that lesson.
I know this is a little off topic. My kids have apple devices, and you have mentioned
in your blog that your kids do as well. Do
you know of a way to password protect certain applications with a pin code? When I want to reward my kids, I can then
unlock the app for them to play. I found
a few apps but you have to jailbreak the phone to do this. It was easy to do on Android, but is seems
because Apple sand boxes the apps it may not be possible. Do you do anything like this for your kids?
Great question. I haven’t yet had to deal with this as my kids are young, and (at this point) pretty trustworthy, so they don’t download anything without asking nor do they surf the web. But, I’ll need to tackle this soon enough.
I do believe that Apple has the ability to add Restrictions, but I haven’t researched that enough yet. However, one option that I plan to check out is the Luma: https://getluma.com/. It let’s you monitor and restrict internet access by device. I don’t think it comes out until the Spring, but it looks really promising.
If all you’re looking to do is give them an app as a reward (great idea, btw), then I think you could just not give them the password to download apps so that you have to physically do it. I don’t think in iOS, un-jailbroken, you could do that automatically.
Hope that helps, and good luck!