At one- and three-years old, Cyrus and Nava Seyedi are already technology aficionados. Like many kids, they watch cartoons on tablets and know their way around a smartphone’s homescreen, or in the case of three-year-old Nava, at least which icon to press to call her aunt on FaceTime.
Raising children in the age of technology has brought about a whole host of questions parents of previous generations never had to answer. This spring, for example, Nava started asking her father — Sep Seyedi, the CEO of mobile app agency Plastic Mobile — about Siri. Who is Siri? How did she get in the phone? And how does she know so much about so many topics?
When Nava then started asking about what her dad does for a living, Seyedi went looking for a book he could read to his daughter to teach her about technology. But after hunting online and through his local bookshops, he couldn’t find any book that fit the bill.
So he decided to write his own.
This month, Seyedi and Plastic Mobile are releasing Letters, Shapes and Technology, a self-published picture book designed to help parents teach their children the ABC’s of technology. Each page has an illustration representing a tech concept: “M” is for mouse, “G” is for Google and “V” is for virtual reality. The idea, Seyedi says, is for parents to sit with their children and explain each concept page-by-page until they get through the full alphabet.
Seyedi may spend his days building mobile tech, but he decided a printed book would serve parents best. Story time in his household, he says, still involves sitting down and turning pages with his kids. He says there’s still something special about holding an actual book and reading it to your kids. (That said, Seyedi says he’s already thinking about the next iteration of the book and is considering the ways an app could also help parents teach their kids about tech.)
Letters, Shapes and Technology’s cover
For Seyedi, the project was a way to show his daughter that technology is for everyone, not just for boys. Back when he was an engineering student at the University of Toronto, Seyedi noted how few of his classmates were women. When he had a daughter, he says it was important that the tech world be a space she felt comfortable in. And the first step in achieving that was immersing her in it early and arming her with knowledge.
Working on the book with his wife Melody and the creative team at Plastic Mobile ended up merging Seyedi’s work and professional worlds together. The two characters featured on each page of the book were inspired by Cyrus and Nava, and early versions of the book were “beta tested” by staffers with children. That process, he says, brought him new perspective on both parts of life. “I didn’t think it would have such a big impact on my life,” he says.
The first run of the book is 500 copies, which will be sold on Amazon and donated to local libraries in the cities where Plastic Mobile operates — Toronto, New York and Chicago.
All of the proceeds from sales will go to SickKids Foundation.
