As spring nears closer, American First Lady Michelle Obama has launched the Let’s Move! campaign. The campaign, as proclaimed on the Let’s Move! site, has a goal “to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation.”
One of the campaign’s components is to make sure that children engage in physical activity. While they need one hour of active play daily, “…8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 ½ hours to using entertainment media including TV, computers, video games, cell phones and movies in a typical day,” as reported on the Let’s Move! website.
We undoubtedly agree that the situation described above is abnormal and extremely unhealthy. But if we try to solve it by keeping children off the computer, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Parents, teachers, and others whom children trust are still able to turn a “bad” computer into a useful educational tool.
Ultimately, we have to face the truth: prohibiting a child from using computers is hardly an accomplishable mission in the 21st century. From our point of view, playing free educational games for a few minutes a day isn’t the worst-case scenario for kids’ computer use. Thus, we would love to invite the First Lady and her daughters to check out an educational game for kids called Driving Kids.
Might the First Lady decide that playing educational games is a worthy way for children to use computers? Would she allow her daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha, to spend some free time on Driving Kids? If her answer to at least one of our questions is positive, it would most likely be one of the most important and significant appraisals that any online game for kids has ever had.
P.S. By the way, our fidelity to the concept of moving is pretty clear: we are Driving Kids, aren’t we? 
