Getting Started with BrainDojo Kids: Your Child's First Session

Handing a tablet to a three-year-old for the first time is a small act of trust. You want to know what happens on the other side of the screen before you let go of it. This post walks through the first ten minutes with BrainDojo Kids: creating a player, running the first activities, seeing how a course actually works, and setting the limits you want in place before your child takes over.

What Is BrainDojo Kids?

BrainDojo Kids is a learning app for ages 3 to 6 that pairs short solo activities with a board game the whole family can play on one device. Courses move from tracing to copying to writing independently, covering Hiragana, Katakana, beginner Kanji, the alphabet, numbers, addition, and subtraction. Between rounds of the board game, cooperative challenges and face-to-face duels appear.

There are no ads and no account to create. You install it and it works.

Step 1: Create a Player

The first thing to do is make a player for your child. Progress, best scores, stamps, and the learning report are all stored per player, so if you have two children, make two players. Siblings will not overwrite each other’s records, and each one gets their own stamp calendar to fill.

You will be asked for an age. This is not a gate that locks anything: it is used to pick sensible defaults for how activities are presented. You can change it later.

Step 2: Run Today’s Training

The home screen shows three picks for the day under Today’s Training. This is the intended way to start, and honestly it is the intended way to keep going: three activities, then done. It takes a few minutes, which is roughly how long a four-year-old’s attention lasts before it needs to go somewhere else.

The first pick might be counting animals, or a pair-matching memory game, or a handwriting stage. Let your child tap it themselves. The controls are large and the layout is portrait, so a small hand can drive the whole thing without help.

Step 3: Walk Through One Course

Once the day’s three are done, open a course to see the structure the app is built on. Every course walks the same four steps:

• Trace. The character appears as a guide, and your child follows the shape with a finger or a stylus.
• Copy. The guide moves aside. A model stays visible, and your child writes the character next to it.
• Write. No guide, no model. Just the box, and what your child remembers.
• Try. A short challenge that puts the character to use.

This order is deliberate, and the fading of the guide is the whole point. Nothing on the screen writes the letter for your child at any stage, and by the third step they are producing it from memory. If they struggle, going back a step is a normal thing to do, not a failure.

Step 4: Set the Limits Before You Hand It Over

Parent settings sit behind a parental gate, so open them once before you give the device to your child.

The setting worth taking a minute over is the daily time limit. Set the number of minutes you are comfortable with, and when it is reached the app shows a lock screen instead of more activities. This turns “time to stop now” from a negotiation into something the app simply says. Most families find this easier than the alternative.

Step 5: Play the Board Game Together

The board game is the part your child will ask for. Two to four players gather around one device, roll the die, and collect stars and coins as they move. Landing on certain squares opens a cooperative game everyone solves together, or a face-to-face duel played from opposite sides of the screen. There is a shop for items and presents to open, and the board layout is different every match.

Most stars wins, with coins breaking a tie. Set it to a short game the first time. You can play a longer one once everyone knows the squares.

What to Expect in the First Week

Do not push for more than the three daily picks at first. The stamp calendar filling in day by day is the mechanism that actually builds the habit, and it works better when a session ends while your child still wants more. After a week or two, open the learning report: it shows how many characters have been written, which is a more honest measure of progress than minutes spent in the app.

Where to Go Next

Once the first session is behind you, read why we built it, pick up practical tips for daily use, or see who the app is for. All related posts are collected under the BrainDojo Kids tag.

If you want to see what your child writes today, the first session takes about ten minutes.