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Writing Improvement
Tutorials
Courtesy of Rick Bailey, A.D.
English Instructor
Toy Story: Looking for Lessons
By Lisa Guernsey
On the Tuesday before Christmas, parents with good
intentions were swarming through the second floor of the Toys
"R" Us store in Times Square.
There, amid columns of bright green plastic and the
flashing headlights of a singing school bus, were shelves of
products by LeapFrog Enterprises, a company based in Emeryville,
Calif., that in six years has become one of the fastest-growing
toy makers in the nation. Its best-selling product is the
LeapPad, an electronic talking book that some analysts say is
even outselling Harry Potter merchandise.
"We like to buy things that are learning-based, more than
just toys," said Dianne Chodaczek of Riverside, Conn., as she
made her way out of the crowd with a $49.99 LeapPad tucked under
her arm. She said she had come on an errand for her grown
daughter, who had already bought a LeapPad for her 4-year-old
son and had decided to get one for her 6-year-old son, too.
"They were out of them in her town in New Jersey," said Ms.
Chodaczek before dashing for the checkout line.
Some parents may cringe at the notion of pricey
electronics' becoming more popular than Play-Doh. But LeapFrog
is bounding ahead, propelled by the financial muscle of its
majority owner, the global education conglomerate Knowledge
Universe. Founded in part by Michael R. Milken, the former
junk-bond trader who has recently focused on educational
projects, Knowledge Universe has enabled LeapFrog to run
multiple television commercials for its products and to spread
its gospel by paying calls on influential education experts.
LeapFrog has joined other companies like Educational
Insights and VTech in the winning combination of coupling
technology with that word that parents love to hear:
educational.
By taking advantage of ever smaller chip sizes and improved
speech synthesis, electronic toys like the LeapPad, the Piccolo
Touch and Talk Interactive Discovery Center and Alphabert &
Sprocket unite two factors that most educators see as integral
to the learning process. They are multisensory, combining
elements that children can see, hear and touch, and they are
interactive, enabling children to take charge of their play
instead of passively receiving whatever stimuli are beamed their
way.
With the LeapPad, for example, a child has to merely touch
the word "cat" with a stylus and the machine will say the word.
Other words and buttons trigger the start of stories or word
games or specific sounds. The idea is that by hearing a word
while seeing and touching it, children will get a leg up in
learning to read. Children a few years older — ages 7 and 8 —
are encouraged to use the LeapPad Pro, a $64.99 product that
does not recite stories but does pronounce new vocabulary words.
"They can pick up a LeapPad, pick out a book and read on
their own," said Mike Wood, LeapFrog's founder and president.
But while the word "educational" may be splashed across their
packaging, no broad studies have been done to assess whether
these toys actually teach anything, something even the
manufacturers acknowledge.
"I can't imagine that these toys make much of a
difference," said Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and
child-development expert at the University of California at
Berkeley who wrote "The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains and
How Children Learn" (William Morrow, 1999). "Especially not as
much as sitting children down on a sofa with some hot chocolate
and reading a good story."
So far, research on such toys has consisted only of small
experiments. LeapFrog says its tests showed reading improvement
among children who use its literacy products in school settings.
And teachers reported that two class groups using two
Educational Insights products, the MathShark and the LaunchPad,
showed significant gains in math and reading. But again, the
sample sizes were too small to yield general conclusions.
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