With two young boys who are keen on reading and math, the LeapFrog collection of toys, electronics, computer games, and videos have been a big part of Nik and Caleb’s Toy Box.  And each year, it is with great interest that Tonya and I, as their parents, check out the latest and greatest to come from the LeapFrog Lilly pad.  So with this year’s crop, my youngest, Caleb age 4, has agreed to put the latest two educational products, the Leapster2 and the Tag through their paces.

In this review, we’ll be playing with the LeapFrog Tag.

It’s a Pen that Reads!!!

So what is the Tag?  Well in a nutshell, it’s a LeapFrog electronic device that reads books and plays games with kids.  Oh, you say, that sounds a lot like the LeapPad from LeapFrog, we’ve seen that before, that’s nothing new, big deal.  Au contraire, the Tag is the slimmed-down-pumped-up version of the LeapPad. Remember Sylvester Stallone in Rocky III?  After Apollo Creed showed Rocky the Eye of the Tiger and Rocky was literally a rock? Man, could he throw a punch. Clubber Lang didn’t know what hit him, but I digress.

The first thing LeapFrog did was get rid of the pad.  Then they got rid of the story cartridge.  The result is a fat pen about the size of a jumbo hotdog that looks something like one you would win at carnival.  It has two buttons (power and play), one rocker switch (volume), a built in speaker, a headphone jack, and a USB connection.  That’s it.

How Does it Work?

To use the Tag, you purchase special books from LeapFrog that look like normal picture books for kids.  Once you have the book, you sync the Tag with your computer using the USB port and provided LeapFrog Connecting software, so you’re going to need a computer.  You then download the story/cartridge components for the Tag from the LeapFrog website, so you’re also going to need internet access. Once the story is downloaded to the Tag, it is now ready to read the story or play the games embedded in the book by touching the tip of the pen to the pages of the book.

Unlike the LeapPad, which used sensors to determine where the child was touching the LeapPad stylus, the Tag has a built in infrared camera in the tip, which scans very small dots printed on the page to ‘read’ the page.  The result is that the Tag can be used anywhere you can open the book.

The pages also contain hidden Easter Eggs, allowing additional fun beyond reading the story. In addition, the Tag can hold 5 stories in its memory.

Tricks of the Pen

While goofing around with the Tag, here are some of the features we discovered:  

First off, the books are rather nice and are just like regular books, so you can always turn off the Tag and read the stories to your kids.  Remember, the Tag is not here to replace you.  

Second, the Tag has a play button allowing the story to be read like an audiobook, i.e.: you don’t need to have to have the book with you to hear the story.  Here I felt LeapFrog fell a little short, in that you can’t read the book with the Tag until you’ve downloaded the story to the Tag, and you can’t play the downloaded story until you’ve activated it by touching the Tag to one of the pages of the book.  LeapFrog should allow customers to download and listen to the story for free using the play button, after which, I can almost guarantee, that if it’s a good story, a child is going to insist upon getting the book to see the characters and play the games.  There you go, just some unsolicited free advice for LeapFrog.

The headphone jack is great for quiet time, however Tonya wants me to point out that LeapFrog should have incorporated a governor switch to control the maximum volume setting of the headphones, especially when it comes to young ears.  Perhaps this is something LeapFrog can fix in a firmware update.  In the meantime, we recommend using kid-friendly headphones, which usually have resistors to prevent unacceptably loud volumes.

The Tag Library

Right now the Tag Library of books has 16 titles including I Spy, Pixar’s Cars, Dora the Explorer, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, and Olivia.  For this review, we received Ozzie and Mack written by Trish Holland, illustrated by Dan Krall (reviewed here), which comes included with the Tag.  We also received SpongeBob Squarepants The Tour de Bikini Bottom written by Scott Sonneborn, illustrated by Warner McGee (reviewed here), and Click, Clack, Moo, Cows That Type written by Doreen Cornin, illustrated by Betsy Lewin (reviewed here).  Ozzie and Mack is a simple child’s story with games, nothing really to write home about.  SpongeBob is your usual silly SpongeBob story with assorted games.  Caleb liked this one.  And finally, Click, Clack, Moo is a humorous story with games that actually had both Tonya and me chuckling out loud.  

Finally, LeapFrog also appears to be expanding on the use of the Tag to include Flash Cards featuring National Geographic Animals.  

The Learning Path

The Tag also takes advantage of LeapFrog’s Learning Path, which allows a parent to interact online with LeapFrog’s educational process. To learn more about this feature, please read my review for the Leapster2.

Overall Impression

Everyday I become more and more amazed at what I’m going to call “educational toys,” which on the surface look more like toys than educational devices.  And then one day out of the blue, one of the boys will surprise me by reading something aloud, doing math in his head, or making a logical and well-reasoned comment, and I have to stop and ask them where they learned it. Their response is usually, “Oh the LeapFrog…”

So I sat down with Caleb and asked him how he wanted to review this and he decided on scale using Stars, 10 being the best and 1 being the worst.  So for the LeapFrog Tag, Caleb has decided to give it 10 Stars.  As for me, I was quite impressed that its simple use is packed with so many neat features, so I’m giving it 7 Dancing Elephants out of 8.  I have to ding them one for the lack of a volume governor switch in the headphone jack.   

Parting Thoughts

Man, when I was a kid, my educational toy consisted of a See ‘n Say… “The cow says Moooooo!!!”