Digital safety can be an adventure.

INFOGALAXIS

About the creator – Andrea Becsei

I am not a computer scientist. I am not a psychologist or a teacher either.

I am a mum who was simply fascinated by the world that artificial intelligence opened up for us.

By the almost unimaginable amount of knowledge now at anyone’s fingertips. By the way we can ask questions, learn, create and discover things that would have needed very different resources only a few years ago. At the same time, I can see how uncertain we adults still feel about it all.

After a while, a question kept coming back to me:

If we are only just learning how this world works, what about our children, who are growing up in it?

Perhaps it mattered so much to me because I had always taken a slightly different approach to this part of raising my own children.

In our home, screens were never the enemy. If they wanted to watch cartoons when they were little, they could. Later came the tablet, the computer, games and everything else that gradually moves into your life when you have two boys. That does not mean I sat beside them in a state of heavenly calm. Sometimes I felt I might lose my mind. 😄 But I never believed in banning everything. I always felt that if technology was part of the world they would have to live in, keeping it away from them would not be how I protected them. I wanted to help them learn how to use it instead.

There is one thing they are probably tired of hearing me say: Keep your balance.

Play. Use the computer. Watch cartoons. Explore. But get up as well. Go outside. Eat. Talk. Do something completely different. Then, if you feel like playing again, go back. The aim is for the digital world to be part of their lives, without becoming their whole lives.

And that is more or less where InfoGalaxis began.

The first ideas actually came while I was working. I was cleaning, and—as often happens to me—my mind was somewhere else entirely. One thought followed another. What if we started when children were still very young? What if we talked about online risks before something had already happened? And what if we helped children recognise things, rather than trying to frighten them? The idea stayed with me for weeks. I thought about it, and it took shape, grew and connected with more and more ideas. At some point, I knew I did not simply want to make a book. I wanted to create a whole world. Something that could grow with children and use stories, characters, games and activities to teach them what they might forget five minutes after a long explanation from an adult. That is how InfoGalaxis was born.

If there is one thing I would like a child to take away from InfoGalaxis, it is recognition. The ability to notice when something is unusual. The confidence to think about what they see or what someone asks them to do. To stay calm, without automatically believing everything. To feel able to ask questions and know they can always turn to an adult they trust. The aim is to help them find their way around the online world with growing confidence, rather than fear.

For parents, I would like to offer something I would have welcomed myself: a simple starting point for talking about these things with a young child. I still do not know how big InfoGalaxis will become. Sometimes I have doubts too. Then I come across another story about something happening to children online, and I reach the same conclusion again: this is worth continuing to build.

Not to teach children to fear the world they are growing up in.

But to help them learn to think within it.

Andrea Becsei
the dreamer and creator behind InfoGalaxis
linkedin.com/in/andrea-becsei