"Learn with Manga: AI & Digital Literacy" reaches 500 stories — 65 themes, every story with a video

NPO Digital Kodomo BASE’s free 4-panel manga series for children, "Learn with Manga: AI & Digital Literacy" (https://digitalkodomo.jp/kids-manga/), now has 500 stories. About three months after launching with 100 stories on June 29, 2026, the series covers 65 themes. Every story comes with a narrated video and a plain-language explanation. No registration is needed, and it is free for everyone. The manga itself is in Japanese.

1. New themes

From late September to early October we added the following 16 themes (10 stories each). Alongside earlier themes such as online safety, healthy social media use and using AI wisely, the series now puts more weight on understanding how things work, making things, and checking for yourself.

• How computers and the internet work
• What is programming? — order, loops, "if", and variables, explained with cooking curry and traffic lights
• Digital on a disaster day — Japan’s 171 disaster message line, saving battery, hazard maps
• Digital for everyone — text size, read-aloud, captions, plain Japanese
• Inside AI — learning from examples, bias, voice cloning
• Digital in our town — GPS, transit IC cards, barcodes, bus arrival boards
• Playing with pixels, sound and video / From player to game designer
• Collecting data to discover things / The family’s digital helper
• Inside the internet / How security works
• Creators’ rights / Digital jobs picture book
• The Earth and digital / When something seems odd

2. What each story includes

Every story bundles a 4-panel manga, a narrated video (about 30 seconds), a plain-language explanation, key points to remember, and a note for parents. Children can read on their own, or families can watch the video together and talk about it. Many stories end with a "try this next" link to our Scratch, Python and Minecraft programming courses or related pages.

3. Take a look

• Series home: https://digitalkodomo.jp/kids-manga/
• All themes: https://digitalkodomo.jp/kids-manga/4koma/
• No.351 (order in programming, explained with curry): https://digitalkodomo.jp/kids-manga/4koma/curry.html
• No.500 (the phone answered when nobody called it): https://digitalkodomo.jp/kids-manga/4koma/yobikake.html

4. The artwork can be used in children’s activities

Illustrations, scene pictures, worksheets and posters from the series are available in our teaching materials library. Non-profit children’s activities, such as families, after-school clubs, community groups and NPOs, may use them without applying.

5. What’s next

We will keep adding stories based on the small "huh?" moments children run into in daily life. If there is a theme you would like us to cover, please contact us. This site is supported by donations; you can support us on our donation page.