Toyologist Review: LeapPad2

Last year, as part of our Toyology assignment, Toys R Us sent us a LeapPad to try out (before it's official release, no less!). At the time it was described as the 'Next Generation of learning'. Now we have the LeapPad2, which can only mean one thing...

LeapPad2: The Deep Space Nine of learning.

DS9 was, without doubt, the best Star Trek series. This means that the LeapPad2 must be the best LeapPad. And it is. It does everything the old LeapPad did (which I wrote about here and I won't repeat for reinventing the wheel reasons), but adds in a number of new features. DS9 added Dabo girls. The LeapPad2 introduces a music player, faster processor, and a second camera so you can take pictures of yourself.

All three are kind of obvious, necessary additions really.

The second camera (located on the face of the LeapPad2) is essential if you want to take photos of yourself. These pictures can then be altered in various ways using the art app. The increase in processor speed is hard to judge, but it certainly seems faster.

Setting up is a bit of a pain. There's a bit of messing about connecting it to a computer before you can start using it.

The number of available apps & games has now increased to 225 - 5 of which come with the LeapPad2. All the games etc are 'education'-based, i.e. children ought to be learning something while they play. The difficulty can be changed depending on the ability of the child - for example the sentences for reading apps are made simpler/more complex depending on the set level. Plugging the LeapPad2 into a PC, you can then monitor how children have been doing. This isn't something I've ever done. I have enough of an idea how my children's education is progressing without having to resort to monitoring what the LeapPad thinks.

I will admit we haven't downloaded or played that many games since we received our LeapPad(1) a year ago, but the clear winner of those we have is the Ben 10 Ultimate Alien game. My 5 year old has completed it many, many times and it's still his game of choice whenever he plays with the LeapPad (and was the first thing he played when trying the LeapPad2!).

It's important to remember that the LeapPad2 is a toy. It's not a tablet computer and you shouldn't expect it to do everything your iPad can.

Battery life is still a problem and rechargables are a must. In fact there's now an official recharger pack you can use. I haven't tested this, but it's well worth looking into. The battery compartment has been redesigned, so I assume the recharger pack will only fit in the LeapPad2. There's also an AC adapter available (separately), but I'm not a fan simply because it destroys the portable aspect of the LeapPad.

LeapPads, to me at least, appear to be a lot like the iPad with regards to model versions. If you were going to buy one, you'd probably get the latest version, but if you already have the old one you'd have to think very hard before you upgraded. The new features are nice, but I'm not sure they're worth paying out £90 for again.

Plus they still haven't thought to include a Humuhumunukunukuapua'a :(

The big worry is that the LeapPad3 is no doubt on the horizon, and we all know what Voyager was like...

Toyologist Review: Leapfrog Learning Table

£34.99 from Toys R Us.

For the purpose of this review (for reasons that will become clear shortly) I attempted to think up the most famous Frenchperson I could.

Obviously, this was Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise.

Now I know he doesn't sound very French, but this is probably because he's spent a lot of time warping about the galaxy, having his body upgraded and asked about room illumination.

I'm almost certain that for when he was a young Picard, his parents, Maurice and Yvette, almost certainly bought him something along the lines of the Leapfrog Learning Table. Why? Well, every Starfleet captain needs to begin his learning somewhere and it will certainly help to know both your native French language and also - since Starfleet Academy is in San Francisco - English.

Toyologist Review: Scribble & Write

My journey through the LeapFrog product catalogue continues, this time time with the Scribble & Write.

A letter is shown in lights on the screen and the child has to write over it with the pen. An extremely happy voice-over person states what the letter is and how to pronounce it. The S&W does both upper and lower case letters & there's a 'game' mode where lights slowly appear on the screen and the child has to guess which letter it's going to be.

It's a bit like an interactive version of this, but now you actually get to write on the screen - 

Ah, the memories...

I was a little unimpressed when I got this out of the box. How much fun can writing letters be? How is this any better than a pen and piece of paper? Turns out I know nothing, and to a 4 year old it's fantastic! Yes, my little monster will happily sit there writing letters on the screen for hours on end a lot longer than I thought he would. At one stage there were 3 children crowding round it trying to guess the letter.

Unlike a similar (in premise) game we have for the LeapPad (the name of which I can't remember), there's no feedback provided for the letter writing. You could scrawl anything and the S&W won't know if you've done it correctly or not. I haven't found this to be too much of a problem. It's easy for a 4yo monster to see for himself if he's doing it right or not, and a 2yo monster can try his best without being put off by lots of 'that isn't quite right!' cries from the S&W (since his motor control isn't spot-on, he got very frustrated playing the LeapPad game). He was very proud when he managed to write three-quarters of an 'H'.

The biggest flaw (/annoyance) with the S&W is the horribly, HORRIBLY annoying music it insists on playing all the time. It's so annoying that every time it starts up I want to get something pointy, shove it down my ears and destroy my eardrums.

No, I'm not exaggerating. It really is that annoying.

The other problem is that you can't use it outside or anywhere brightly lit as you can't see the lights.

At under £20 (currently reduced to £14.97 on the TRU website) it's reasonably priced and perfect for any child who's just starting to write letters.

Just ensure you stick the children in another room while they're playing with it.

Other Toyology reviews can by found in the Toys R Us Toy Box on Facebook.

Toyologist Review: My Puppy Pal Scout

£19.97 from Toys R Us

A line must be drawn. This far and no further. No more LeapFrog products in our house! It's time to pass some of them on to someone else. How about next door? Yes, their house seems a little lacking in LeapFrog products. Time for them to do some testing.

So they did.

Toyologist Review: Tag Junior

£29.99 from Toys R Us (includes 1 book, others sold separately at £9.99)

I'm scared of libraries. It didn't begin this way.  I used to like going to the library and looking at all the books. Things started to change when I had to go to the library to look stuff up for homework purposes (a distant and hard to remember time before Wikipedia, Google, hell even before Encarta). Then Buffy came along and taught me that monsters live beneath libraries. And Doctor Who told me that there was a 50-50 chance of turning into a walking skeleton or being 'saved'. Not to mention the rampant monkeys apes...

Still, at least by this time there was Google.

Anyway, there's a good chance public libraries aren't going to be around for much longer which begs the question: where are the Vashta Nerada going to live now?

Which kind of brings me to the latest arrival from Toys R Us: the LeapFrog Tag Junior. It's aimed at 2-4 year olds, and will definitely not in any way help your child to learn to read. But then that isn't really the point of it. The sole purpose, basically, of the Tag Junior is to get children to have an interest in books. The idea being that if a child has fun with this book then he/she is going to be more likely to want to pick up further books.

And then the fun really begins.

Rowling, Pratchett, King, Pullman, Johnson... All these and more await the child who makes the good decision to start reading.

The Tag system is really rather clever - and I say that as a person who is clever. You download the audio from the internet onto the little hand-held thingamajig, then as the child presses this on different areas of the book it makes different sounds.

If you look closely at the pages you'll see that all the pages are 'dotty' and the thingamajig reads the dots to make the correct noises.

You can fit 5 books on the thingamajig, which means that 5 books is probably the maximum number of books you're going to buy for it. It's a bit of messing about (far more that is really necessary) downloading the audio  so not something a parent would want to do all the time. It'd also be annoying if you'd just deleted Book A to make room for Book F and then the child decided he wanted to read Book A again.

The only problem with this product is that the wrong people will be buying it. The type of person who buys this is probably one who regularly sits down with their children and reads books with them (which is what I'd consider to be by far the best way of getting children to enjoy reading). My children had a bit of a play with it, but would much rather Dad/Mum/Aunty Sophie read a book with them instead.

If you're looking for an unusual gift for a child who has little interest in reading then the Tag Junior is well worth considering. It may even be worth buying for an adult who simply likes clever gadgets.

Other Toyology reviews can by found in the Toys R Us Toy Box on Facebook.

Toyologist Review: Leapfrog LeapPad Explorer

£79.99 at Toys R Us.

We have a lot to thank Star Trek for. Geeky people everywhere would have spent their lives lost and confused with nothing to do in an evening - they might have tried to interact with regular folk instead of staying home in front of the TV (it's ok to make fun of geeks - I am one). Whoopi Goldberg would never have taken up acting. The Boy and Me would never have had a crush on Wesley. No one would know that Hamlet was originally written in Klingon. And I would have had to wear normal clothes at my wedding.

We would also have been without the mobile phone and the tablet computer.

Maybe.

Tablet computers first showed up on Star Trek in the 60s (or 23rd Century, depending upon whether you view 'Star Trek' as a documentary or not) and were large clipboard-like devices worked with a stylus. When The Next Generation started in the 80s (/24th Century) tablet computers were everywhere. And had been named Personal Access Data Devices.

PADDs.

So then...the iPad - which almost definitely doesn't owe its name or look to the object carried round by Captain Picard. As every parent who owns an iPad knows, you can't have it out for long before your child wants a go. Not that I have an iPad, but Granddad does.

Once upon a time my children used to get excited when Granddad came to visit. Now they get excited when Granddad's iPad comes to visit.

My kids love playing games like Cover Orange, Cut the Rope and the infamous Angry Birds. The problem with the iPad and children, however (besides the fact that they never let you have it back), is that it's incredibly easy for them to start clicking and suddenly they've bought a million apps.

A solution was needed. And that solution is the LeapPad!

Toyologist Review: My Own Leaptop

£19.97 from Toys R Us.

I should point out I have no experience of the education of children beyond being a parent and knowing...hmm, it seems I know a whole load of primary school teachers (none of whom I consulted about this product prior to review). I have taught a some university students some maths and supervised a bunch of laboratory sessions, but most of those people could already read and write.

(Saying that, I did mark some lab reports from some biochemists once and most of them definitely couldn't read or write if the bizarre stuff they put in their reports was anything to go by. You know, those who actually bothered to write anything at all.)