For parents
What is a good screen-free gift for a four-year-old?
The screen-free gifts that survive share three properties: they can be played with alone, they work in a small indoor space, and they have new content or new rules arriving over time. Most of the ones that fail do so because they are the same thirty seconds forever, or because they need an adult every single time.
It has to work without you
A gift that needs an adult to set up, run and referee gets played with on the day it arrives and at Easter. Whether a four-year-old can start it on their own is the single best predictor of whether it is still in use in three months.
That does not mean it has to be solitary. It means starting it must not require a grown-up.
It has to change
A toy with a fixed set of sounds is exhausted in a fortnight. What lasts is breadth: several worlds rather than one, each with enough in it that a child has not heard everything by February.
This is the argument for the ones with software in them — a ball with four characters on it is four toys — and the reason to look at how much content a thing actually ships with rather than at what is promised for later.
It has to fit the house you have
Most homes do not have a hall to run in. A gift that needs one is a summer toy. The ones that work all year are the ones built around stopping and starting rather than around distance — which is also, conveniently, what a downstairs neighbour prefers.
Storyball is a ball, so it is worth saying plainly: the indoor games are the freeze, pass and guess kind, and the throwing ones are for outside.
Storyball is our answer to this
A screen-free ball that children have to move to play. The app is free and pairs it in about a minute.
Free. No account, no in-app purchases, nothing collected about your child.