Fraboom Online Children's Museum — Review

Bottom Line: a website providing videos, interactive books, live classes, games, and more for kids ages 6-12. Lots of free content and, for a reasonable cost, get access to very cool online classes for drawing. Plus, there’s an animated cow teaching how to draw cartoon moustaches. Does it get any better?

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Fraboom Online Children’s Museum detours slightly from our typical app review, because it’s not an iOS app but a children’s educational website. The creator of Fraboom, Flying Rhinoceros, has created so many parts to the “museum” that this review took me longer than my typical app review. The website contains a lot of free content with the option for even more with a membership — a Gold membership is currently $5.99 a month.

The live online classes (part of the Gold membership) are what really make this website worth the money. The Fraboom website FAQ says they are created to be like any class from a children’s museum, with games, interaction, and an educational piece. I have an 11 year old son (pictured at right enjoying his online Fraboom class) with a quirky sense of humor and a love of drawing. It’s as if they used him as a test subject when designing the class he took (Drawing Academy Dinosaurs) — he laughed, “chatted” with the instructor, drew, and interacted through the entire thing.

As soon as the class ended, he wanted to know if he could do the next one; shortly after, he and his two siblings were sitting at the table drawing and personalizing their sketch books (paper stapled together). Now that is what I call inspiration! As I always look for activities to inspire thinking and creativity during the summer, I am extra thankful for instructor Ryan’s humor, which so quickly got my son engaged.

Privacy isn’t a concern, either. The only information gathered by the site is the parent’s email address and login information. All of my children can use the site (with three kids in the target demographic, this makes the $5.99 a month a real bargain for me!) without their names. My son didn’t use his real name, but even if he had, he could only chat with the instructor and see the instructor’s responses to him — the only one on camera is the instructor and the other students’ chat responses are hidden.

I found it a perfect chance for him to practice appropriate online behavior in a supervised environment. Sending kids off into social media without any training or previous coaching seems ill-advised, at best. Fraboom live classes let kids experiment with online chat in a very supervised and age-appropriate environment.

The other activities were a hit with my kids, too. There are videos, interactive books, and games, along with the live classes, and two current feature exhibits — The Mouth and Bugs! These two exhibits organize games, videos, books, and even printable activity books. The FAQ says content will continue to be added, and the soon-to-come interactive book about dinosaurs makes me suspect the next topic may well be the prehistoric favorites.

The interactive books were my favorite activity, aside from the live classes. There are currently three options: The Munchy-Crunchy Bug Book, Internal Adventures of Marcus Snarkis, and The Battle Against Boredom (A Dinosaur Ate My Homework is coming soon).

The books about bugs and the body (Internal Adventures) provide exhibit-like information on each topic. The words are highlighted as they are read aloud, and there are interactive elements on each page. Some of the interactions were really funny — watching the animated food move through a bug body was great — and I certainly learned a lot. Did you know that we produce enough saliva in one day to almost fill a two-liter soft drink container? Or that bees have a wing speed of 200 bpm?

They weren’t perfect — the text of the stories was read aloud and highlighted, but all of the information provided in the interactive elements (the true education of the books) was not read. This means the younger users will not really gain so much from the books, unless an adult is reading with them. Also, there were a lot of repetitive noises that just annoyed me, and only once did I find a way to make it stop (by clicking “Tell Fred to shut up!” hidden at the bottom of the screen.)

My kids were big fans of Fraboom TV. They quickly obliged my request to review an episode of Flying Rhino Jr. High, a cartoon with humor that reminded me of PBS’s CyberChase (a family favorite). Again, my kids found it very funny, and I heard quite a few moments of wisdom such as “Enforcing the rules is one thing, but now you’re just bossing people around,” and “The point is, we have to work together to fight these guys!” in the Junior High Noon episode we watched. The other episodes hit on topics I could easily use in speech-language therapy, too — personal space, teasing, snooping in someone’s journal, and dealing with disappointment, to name a few.

There are lots of shorter clips on the on-demand video, which also made my children laugh. The silliness was a lot of fun, and Drawing Academy videos are even available on-demand. My 11 year old cartoonist was quickly adding moustaches to his current comic strip cast.

I wasn’t as impressed with the games, though my three children did play willingly. They were not nearly as sophisticated as the free games on PBS or our favorite iPad games, with more of a feel of the early video games I played when I was a kid. They all worked, but by themselves they wouldn’t be worth the membership fee. Still, my 9 year old has been begging for Pac-Man, and the tooth fairy version on Fraboom made his day.

Overall, I am very glad I had the chance to review Fraboom right as we’re getting ready for the summer break from school. My kids know that they have to complete some learning activities each day, and Fraboom will now be added to their lineup. There is a lot of free content on Fraboom, even a free live class, and I highly recommend that parents of kids between 6-12 check it out.

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Heather Hetler thinks her 9 year old with a palate expander is currently producing at least 10 liters of saliva a day.