Kids Shelf, your kids' own little internet
Turns a spare computer into a kid-safe internet with only the videos you downloaded and chose.
Kids Shelf runs on one computer in the house and serves a curated set of downloaded YouTube videos, offline Wikipedia/Vikidia, and math/spelling practice to any browser on the home network — phone, TV or old laptop — with no algorithm or autoplay, so a video just stops when it ends. Daily time limits count down per kid, with unused minutes rolling over; math and spelling rounds can each earn up to 3 extra minutes a day, and shows tagged Learning cost half the usual minutes. It's free, open source under MIT, downloads only what you explicitly add, and self-updates with a rollback if an update fails to start.
What holds up
- +No algorithm or autoplay — a video just stops, so there's no next-video loop to get hooked on
- +Works across every screen in the house from one computer, nothing to install elsewhere
- +Daily earned minutes from math/spelling target the facts a kid hasn't mastered yet
- +Free and open source (MIT), with no accounts, ads or tracking
Mind the limits
- −Needs one always-on computer at home to serve every other screen — not a cloud service
- −Offline library sizes range up to about 120 GB for full English Wikipedia, needing real disk space
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