Announcing the Toontastic Summer Tooning Story Contest!
June 16, 2011
Looking for a creative way to engage young students with their summer reading? How about encouraging them to re-tell that story themselves via Toontastic, an iPad app that makes it easy to create and share cartoons? The Toontastic team wants to encourage summer readers to share their favorites, and have even lowered the price of the app to just 99 cents for the next three weeks! Andy Russell shares the scoop:
Ah Summer Break… a magical but all-too fleeting time of scraped knees, family roadtrips in overpacked minivans, and one-hit-wonders on the radio. It can be a salvation to students and teachers alike, but also a well-documented academic setback for many kids. Summer reading programs are a fantastic way to keep students engaged and challenged, but books are all-too-often put off till the last days of August — which, to our minds, sort of defeats the purpose.
In the spirit of kicking summer off on the right foot (insert pirate chuckle), the team at Launchpad Toys has created the Toontastic Summer ‘Tooning Story Contest. Say that three times fast — I dare ya! With this contest, kids can recreate their favorite summer reading books as cartoons using our iPad app, Toontastic, and submit their stories to ToonTube for the world to vote on. The winner of the Top ‘Toon award will receive their choice of our favorite LEGO playset or a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com to pick out a few books of their own (or other fun stuff). Please check out our blog for more information on the contest.
Good luck, Playful Cartoon Creators! We can’t wait to see your favorite books come alive!
Andy Russell is an educational media producer and a co-founder of Launchpad Toys. Inspired by the movie BIG and a lifelong obsession with small brightly colored plastic bricks, Andy is a graduate of Learning Design programs at Stanford and Northwestern and has worked for companies like Hasbro and Sony PlayStation to design playful learning experiences for kids.
