Fish behave like fish
Each one has a temperament of its own: it cruises, hovers, darts off, leans into a turn. Tap the glass and they scatter, hold a finger against it and they gather, throw food and they come for it with their mouths open.
Print a sheet, hand over the markers, take a photo with a phone — and the fish your child coloured swims in an aquarium on the big screen. One evening, one printer, no accounts at all.
Free, nothing to sign up for and nothing to install: an aquarium is a page in a browser.
Thirty-four fish to choose from, one A4 page each. Any printer will do — the sheets are black and white on purpose.
Markers, pencils, glitter, stripes that no fish has ever had. Only the four black squares in the corners stay clean: they are how the phone finds the paper.
Open the aquarium on a phone and hold the sheet in the frame. The drawing comes off the paper in about a second, straightened out and cut along the fish.
The fish arrives from the edge of the screen in a burst of bubbles, with its name under it — on the television, on the phone, on every screen that is watching.
Each one has a temperament of its own: it cruises, hovers, darts off, leans into a turn. Tap the glass and they scatter, hold a finger against it and they gather, throw food and they come for it with their mouths open.
Sunlight ripples over the sand, bubbles rise from the floor, a crab walks the bottom and a turtle passes behind every few minutes. A shark, a ray, a jellyfish and an octopus have sheets of their own.
Point the phone at the square on the television and the two are paired — nothing to type. Everyone in the room sees the same water at the same moment.
Families who open theirs up lend each other a fish for the day, and a drawing your child falls for can be brought home to your own water. Hearts, never scores: nothing here is ranked.
There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay: an aquarium is a link and a password, kept in this browser. No advertising. Nobody can write to anybody — there is no free text between strangers anywhere in the product, only a fish and a heart. Every drawing can be downloaded and kept.
Ten minutes, one sheet and a box of markers. By bedtime there is a fish in the water with a name of its own.