One exciting new field in computing is virtual reality. Right now it is poised to explode as the first round of consumer VR headsets enter the market. What kid wouldn’t be interested in a VR headset? How do you turn that interest into a career in VR or computing. Well there are currently a few apps that let you create virtual worlds. Kind of like minecraft which every kid loves but building actual environments that could be used in game development.

Epic’s Unreal engine is a programming environment for creating virtual reality and video games. They have just released an update that allows you to build the environments within virtual reality. Watch the video above and it looks like minecraft on steroids! What kid wouldn’t want to spend time working with it. The great thing is your child is learning a valuable skill and might someday get a great job developing VR games and apps! It’s a great time to build games with this environment. A few years ago it would have cost many thousands of dollars per month to develop with it. Now you can develop for free and are only charged a 5% royalty once your game is making at least $1000 per month.

If Unreal engine looks a bit complicated, take a look at Voxelus. It’s a simpler platform for creating VR environments.

So get your child interested in creating things for Virtual Reality, you might find out they have more fun creating rather than playing video games!

Building a lemonade stand is so last century! Today’s kids have access to resources that make building a real business possible. One of the newest trends is to become a YouTube star. This job opportunity didn’t even exist a few years ago. Some of the top stars make millions per year. Perhaps the most well known star is PewDiePie. His youtube channel became popular as he showed himself playing through various video games. This job probably sounds pretty great to most kids. Every kid I know loves playing video games for hours on end. Now hook up a video camera and get good talking about your experience and you could be on your way to a seven figure income. PewDiePie’s income was estimated at around $8 million last year. Not bad for playing some video games!

Maybe your child’s one of the few not into video games. Does he or she like toys? Well start a youtube channel on toy reviews! Evantube is a nine year old who reviews toys. It is estimated he makes over a million dollars per year! Not a bad gig for playing with toys all day. But his salary is a drop in the bucket for what some make reviewing toys. DisneyCollector is estimated to make $13 million per year.

Finally don’t like toys or video games? Well how about a channel just exploring the day to day activities of your family? The Bratayley family does just that earning an impressive $1.6 million annually.

These are just a few of the people earning fantastic incomes on YouTube. Whatever you like to do, just begin documenting it on YouTube. Who knows you might find yourself making a great living while having a blast with your passion!

Even if you’re child doesn’t make a lot of money on their channel, just think of all the great skills he or she could pick up. They would learn to speak eloquently and explain concepts in front of a camera. They would learn about video production including video and audio editing. Who knows with a little hard work and luck they could become the next YouTube star!

This week Alpha Go victory shows the great strides artificial intelligence is making. It was predicted that it would take at least another decade before this milestone was reached. While there is great promise with all of the new possibilities AI can create, it can also be a bit scary as we see the potential for many jobs to be automated away. As an example: self driving cars could be on the roads by 2020. Think of all of the jobs that revolve around transporting things: Taxi’s, UPS, Truck Drivers, etc. Even the car industry could be in for a shakeup as cars might become a shared commodity. This is just one category where machine intelligence could take millions of jobs out of the marketplace. Unfortunately most of the recent growth sectors for jobs have been primarily in the service industry and these jobs might be some of the first to be automated away.

Thinking about all of the jobs that will go away over the coming years it can be hard to know what areas are relatively safe from automation. What avenues will be available for our kids in the future? When major changes occur, there are huge opportunities for entrepreneurs. To look for opportunities one needs to look for the industries that are currently taking advantage of exponential trends. Right now opportunities are coming for Robotics, 3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Computing, Genetics, and Nanotech. The convergence of these technologies will create exciting new opportunities for entrepreneurs. The question is how can we get our children interested in these technologies now. Schools do little to encourage interest and quite frankly by the time they setup a curriculum for one of these technologies it will be out of date given how fast things are changing. So in a future post we will look at how to spark your child’s interest in one or more of these technology fields.

Watch this video if you have a further interest in Artificial Intelligence by the CEO of DeepMind.

Young entrepreneurs have more advantages than the golden days of lemonade stands and car washes. When kids embrace technology for more than game play, great things happen. Or in the case of of these pre-teenagers they have turned gameplay into a business.

It isn’t often that a kid’s app, let alone an educational kid’s app, has me begging my 6 year old for a turn.

The Everything Machine is that app. Through visual programming your child can make anything they can think up. It all starts with a power source and from there the options are limitless. But for those that get stuck or need some ideas there are great examples to get the creative juices flowing.

Having played with my fair share of electrical kit toy sets what is amazing about this app is it can’t be broken. I have a box of broken circuits and power sources leaving the entire set inoperable. Learning how to make a light work or power a fan is fun for kids and parents.

Check out The Everything Machine and try not making your kids mad when your turn lasts too long.

Have a middle schooler who is serious about computer science? Try Snap! also know as (Build Your Own Blocks) which is a visual drag and drop programming language. It can run right in the browser. There is nothing to download.

Meet Sphero – the app-enabled ball that does it all. There is a cool way to code and it involves nothing more than wanting to play. Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson created Sphero. Intelligent and well-rounded, Sphero is a brave explorer, a teachable robot, and an entirely new way to play There’s no rule that says learning shouldn’t be fun, or that playing can’t be valuable. If there is, the SPRK Edition was created to break it.

Kids love Sphero, so the inventors turned that love into learning and creation. SPRK makes the skills of the future approachable and practical. And most importantly, fun.

The SPRK app experience lets you give your robot the orders with visual blocks representing code – their own C-based language called OVAL. Immediately see the connection between the program you created and how the guts of your Sphero work and react. Sphero SPRK Edition will inspire a love of robotics, coding, and STEM principles… all through play. SPRK is simple enough for beginners of all ages, yet sophisticated enough for seasoned programmers. The SPRK community is thriving as thousands of kids shape their future through fun and discovery. Fire up your imagination and break the rules about learning.