emily conrad

In my family, we’ve had our eye out for the new Junior Tag Reader from Leapfrog since it came out in January. I’m often impressed with the design and capabilities of LeapFrog’s products, especially after such a wildly successful experience with Learn and Groove . I got that hideous thing at my babyshower and was so inclined to return it, but my mother discouraged me. Turns out to be my daughter’s favorite toy to this day. But now that she is starting to outgrow it, we’re happy to move forward too.

The Tag Reader is a book companion that can be tapped or dragged over pages to have the image or text be spoken outloud. It reinforces language skills in children and gets them excited about reading, at least in theory. We thought we’d test it out for ourselves.

How it works:
The Twitter version (Thanks @andrewmiller): “They use the Anoto pattern of tiny dots tracked by the pen’s camera. each combo is unique, so the pen knows which “page” it’s in”.

Also known as Digital Ink, the paper has these tiny 2-Dimensional bar codes (like mini QR codes) that are visible to the naked eye, but indecipherable. Each image or text has it’s own unique code that the pen reads. So it’s like a scanner at the grocery store, or even something like a phone reading a QR code, which makes me think this will all doable through mobile someday.

The Interaction:
Blue is fascinated with the pen, it’s white and bright green with two buttons. It even has two rubber nubs on top that look kind of like eyes. At first all she wanted to do was turn the pen on and off because it makes fun sounds. Buttons and fun sounds can entertain her for a good while, and did until I showed her what she’s “supposed” to do (lost points there).

Books and pens don’t mix in her mind, this is pretty much how we’ve trained her. So she didn’t immediately grasp it. And with books, she likes to quickly point and touch an image and say what it is, or even better what sound it makes, over and over (rib-bit, rib-bit, rib-bit). So she carried over this behavior and used the pen as a pointer to quickly tap the image. And it spoke, so she didn’t immediately. It was like watching her learn a new language pattern. But she quickly got the hang of it and then charged off to something else next.

I’m curious to watch her grow into this new toy. If she’ll have the patience to listen to it, and do more hovering over the pages and less jabbing with it. The book we got (there’s only a handful of them available, and the pen can only hold the information for 5 books) was Dora, so it alternates between Spanish and English. This was confusing to her because there’s no visual cue explaining that the pen is spaking about the same object. For example if the page could respond to the pen by outlining the mango, Blue might better understand the mango is being described in two ways.

And one thing that I don’t understand is why we have to listen to the anonymous and often annoying voices, why can’t I just record myself or other people familiar to Blue? I’ve been doing a lot of this sort of prototyping on my own . It just makes sense to supply this sort of capability in a flawless interface, which btw the website that you have to log into to initiate the Junior Tag reader is not. The more toys I play with, the wider the market seems to grow.

Tomorrow we have a plane ride and will see how it goes. I know at this point I’ve gotten more fun out of the Reader than she has, so hopefully that will change.