TinyFingers Early Years

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What it is

TinyFingers is a finger-painting app made for young children. A child paints with one finger, a palm or many fingers at once, and every touch makes color, light and sound.

TinyFingers Early Years is a version of the app made for daycare centres and early childhood education. A municipality or another organisation needs only one licence for all its devices.

• Ink that fades on its own: lines fade away in 1 to 5 minutes, so the page never gets muddy and an adult does not have to keep clearing it.
• Colors that play music: every touch plays a note from a pentatonic scale, so the notes always sound good together.
• Many ways to touch: five fingers draw a rainbow, a slap of the palm makes sparkles, and the stamps (stars, hearts, paw prints, butterflies, rockets) suit the youngest, who poke the screen rather than draw.
• No accidental wiping: a hand on the edge of the screen does not wipe the picture, because clearing it takes a press and hold.
• Easy to use: a night mode, and the crayons on the left or the right for left- and right-handed children.

What is different from the home version

Early Years is a separate version made for early childhood education, kept completely apart from the app for individuals, which is sold separately for home use:

• No time limit. The home version has a 10-minute free trial; Early Years has no time limit.
• No purchases and no purchase prompts. There is nothing to buy and no link to a shop anywhere in the app.
• No ads. None of any kind.
• No network traffic. It works fully offline.
• No data. No user accounts and no analytics; the app collects, stores and sends no personal data.
• It speaks to adults. The menu button, the lock and the menu say Adults in every language.

What each app does and does not collect

TinyFingers Paint privacy policy (in English)

Adult-led use and painting together

TinyFingers Early Years is made to be used by an adult together with the children, not to be handed to a child alone.

• The adult leads. The adult opens the app, decides when it ends and stays with the children. The settings and the button that closes the app are behind the lock for adults.
• No time limit of its own. The app has no timer, so the adult decides how long a session lasts. No ads and no purchase prompts interrupt it.
• Painting together. An adult and a child, or two children, can take turns or paint together at one device, led by an adult.

Device lock

The device can be locked to the app, so a child stays inside TinyFingers:

• iPad Guided Access (Settings › Accessibility › Guided Access), or the single app mode of your device management (MDM).
• Android Screen pinning: with app pinning switched on in Android’s settings, TinyFingers offers to pin itself to the screen, so Home, Back and other apps stay out of reach until an adult unpins it.
• Windows TinyFingers fills the screen and blocks the Windows key, Alt+Tab and Alt+F4 until an adult unlocks it, so a touchscreen laptop is safe for children too. A PC can also be locked to the app completely with Windows kiosk mode (Assigned Access).

The settings and the button that closes the app are behind a lock for adults, so children can't change the settings or close the app. To open the lock, tap the four corner numbers from the lowest to the highest, twice.

How to set up each lock, platform by platform

Dedicated device

For a device that is left out in the open, for example in a library or on a playground, the Adults menu has a Dedicated device setting with two options. Both are off by default.

• Hide the Adults button. The button is removed. An invisible 72 px square in the top corner, on the side away from the crayons, opens the adults' check after one finger has stayed on it for 20 seconds. A faint ring fills from 10 seconds.
• PIN. A 6-digit PIN on the app's own keypad replaces the corner-number check everywhere, and the menu always asks for it. 5 wrong tries pause the keypad for 60 seconds. Only a salted hash of the PIN is stored, on the device. A forgotten PIN is cured by reinstalling the app, or by your device management reinstalling it.

Text and languages

All text is in the adults' menu, behind the lock: the child's view has only the button that opens it. The menu is in 19 languages and follows the device's language.

English, Finnish, Swedish, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Screenshots

Free pilot

Licence

• One licence per organisation, for all its devices: iPad, Android and Windows.
• A yearly licence, with updates and email support included.
• Halfsky Publishing keeps the app compatible with new versions of the operating systems throughout the licence period.

The price depends on the number of children in your early childhood education. It is not printed on this site: ask for an offer.

Ask for an offer

The licence is platform-agnostic: it covers all of the organisation's early childhood education devices, whatever their operating system. On iPad the app is a private app for your Apple School Manager, on Android a private app through Managed Google Play, and on Windows an MSIX package for your device management, for example Microsoft Intune. Read more: delivery and installation, platform by platform.

Demos

• TinyFingers Paint

  The demo runs in your browser, on an iPad, a tablet or a computer, in your device's language. Paint with several fingers at once; the sound starts with the first touch. To open the adults' menu, tap Adults, then the four corner numbers from the lowest to the highest, twice.

  In a browser the lock can only go full screen; the installed app locks the device. The demo app makes no network requests of its own; the page around it counts visits like the rest of this website, under the same consent rules (see Data protection).

  Try TinyFingers Paint

  About TinyFingers Paint Early Years

• TinyFingers Rescue

  Demo: coming

Curriculum

Below are the sections of the national core curricula that TinyFingers Paint is designed to support when an adult leads the activity. Only section numbers and names are listed; the texts of the curricula are not quoted. This is our own reading: it is neither an assessment nor a recommendation by the Finnish National Agency for Education (OPH). A local plan can specify the sections further.

National core curriculum for early childhood education and care 2022

• 2.7.2 Cultural competence, interaction, and self-expression
• 2.7.5 Digital competence
• 4.5.2 Diverse forms of expression

Esiopetuksen opetussuunnitelman perusteet 2014 (our translation: National core curriculum for pre-primary education 2014)

• 2.5.2 Kulttuurinen osaaminen, vuorovaikutus ja ilmaisu (our translation: Cultural competence, interaction and expression)
• 2.5.5 Tieto- ja viestintäteknologinen osaaminen (our translation: Information and communication technology competence)
• 4.3.1 Ilmaisun monet muodot (our translation: Diverse forms of expression)

TinyFingers Rescue is not ready yet, so it has no matching list.

Numbers and names were read from OPH's own texts on ePerusteet (Finnish and Swedish) and from OPH's English PDF on 6 November 2026:

• National core curriculum for early childhood education and care 2022 (fi)
• National core curriculum for early childhood education and care 2022 (sv)
• National core curriculum for early childhood education and care 2022 (en)
• Esiopetuksen opetussuunnitelman perusteet 2014 (fi)
• Esiopetuksen opetussuunnitelman perusteet 2014 (sv)

Screen time

On 22 January 2026 the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) and the Finnish National Agency for Education (OPH) published national digital recommendations for children. They concern children's free time. In early childhood education, the use of devices is planned and led by adults, and TinyFingers Early Years is designed for that kind of use. We do not say that OPH or THL recommends TinyFingers or has assessed it. Press release by OPH and THL (in Finnish)

Contact

Questions, or an offer for your organisation? Write to early-years@tinyfingers.fi.