Tag Archives: launchpad toys

Educational psychology has long recognized the impact of informal learning in child development. In fact, most educators and psychologists believe that young students learn more from other kids with shared perspectives and experiences than from adults so far removed from childhood. Whether at home, on the playground, or in the classroom, students assimilate, construct, and in-turn teach and reflect on new knowledge better in informal peer communities than more traditional “instructivist” settings. So wouldn’t it be amazing if we could…

Avast! Today marks an exciting day for our hornswoggling crew here at Launchpad Toys: Toontastic Jr. Pirates is LIVE in the App Store for iPhone and iPad! With 3 million cartoons created in over 150 countries, our first app – Toontastic – has been a great success for kids ages 6-12. Now, with the launch of Toontastic Jr. and our new StoryShare platform for online, creative Co-Play, little brothers and sisters as young as 3 years old can create their…

Picture for a second the first thing you ever constructed, designed, prototyped, or invented. If you’re like most of us, there’s a pretty good chance that you built your idea using toys like LEGOs, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs, or perhaps, to your parents’ dismay, a mix of all of the above (good luck getting Play-Doh out of those bricks). Over the years, magazines like MAKE have featured lots of DIY toy projects, but very few talk about designing for Creative Play…

The leaves are changing, the air is getting crisp… and your teeth are hurting just LOOKING at all the candy stacked up in the grocery aisles. Yes, it’s October and Halloween is just around the corner! To celebrate this most playfully creative holiday, we’re very excited to announce that the Cooney Center is partnering with Mobile Learning Finalist Launchpad Toys to create a Spooky Story Contest for kids and parents to create and share their favorite Ghost Stories and Terrifying…

I recently had the pleasure of sitting on a panel at the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning conference to discuss mobile learning. As our good friends at Project Noah and other games/apps like The Hidden Park have shown, mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad present incredible opportunities for developers like ourselves to get kids out of the house, learning about the world around us, and sharing their findings with peers around the globe. Inevitably, the Million-Dollar-Question arose: How…

Give a young child a couple of toys or a box of crayons and he or she is likely to play for hours, deeply engrossed in an imaginary world. In both art and dramatic play, children construct settings, create fictional characters, and act out fantastic storylines that would be the envy of many Hollywood scriptwriters. Yet, ask that same child to write out a story in a blank notebook or a word processor and you would be lucky to capture…

Applications for our November 2010 Mobile Design Boostare closing this Friday – September 24. We will select up to 15 3-4 person entrepreneurial teams to participate in the Boost. Developed in conjunction with IDEO, the Mobile Design Boost is a four day building, hacking, business and human centered design immersion taking place in San Francisco, November 11-14, 2010. There is no cost for the program itself, applicants just need to cover their travel and lodging costs. The application deadline is…