I downloaded the Leo’s Pad app, and the four free
“appisodes” that go with it so far, on the advice of SmartAppsforKids.com (an
awesome resource, which I subscribe to in my Facebook feed) and then forgot all
about it until Brooklyn started talking about the characters as though they were
real people. The first time she mentioned
Cinder, I assumed she meant Cinderella. But this Cinder goes with Leo,
not Prince Charming. And there’s a Marie, who Brooklyn likes because she goes
out of her way to include her friends in things, as well as someone named
Gally. It wasn’t until I went to the website to research this post that I
realized the characters she was talking about are young Leonardo da Vinci,
Marie Curie, and Galileo Galilei.
(Cinder is Leo’s pet dragon.) Figuring that out drove me to the iPad to watch some Leo’s Pad for myself.
Leo’s Pad is a series of animated stories with embedded
games that adapt to just the right level of difficulty as you go along. The
appisode that I watched/interacted with began with Cinder darting away and hiding
from Leo. I was asked to check and see if he was behind the circle, or the door
with the number 5 on it, or the blue curtain… clearly a test of my
understanding of shapes, numbers, and colors. After that Leo explained that it
was Gally’s birthday and so we should make him a present; first I got to draw
him a card with stickers and a paint application, then fit the parts of a
telescope together like a puzzle while Leo named the parts, using the
scientific vocabulary words for them. And the last thing I did before I got
interrupted and had to put the iPad down was to choose the right amount of
stones to launch Leo into the air with a catapult so that he could fly with
mechanical wings next to Cinder off to Gally’s birthday party.
The combination of art, science, and historical content
crammed into one short appisode was dizzying (nevermind the review of the
preschool content!) My five-year-old has no idea who these people are, and
doesn’t particularly care. But basic machines and the relationship between the
friends are themes she relates to. And the interaction with the characters in
her stories is very cool. This next generation “appisode” that learns about its
viewer and adapts as it goes along strikes me as the very thing the iPad was
made for. People talk about the big break through that Blues Clues and Dora the
Explorer were for preschool television because they talked directly to the kids
and waited for an answer. Well, now the kids can talk back, and the characters
are actually listening. How cool is that…?!
But wait there’s more… The app also features a Parent’s Pad,
on which you can track your child’s progress with different skills. It’s a
built-in assessment tool that tells you if a child (or different children)
improved or declined with things like color identification. Or letter tracing.
And it will tell you which games the children played and appisodes they
watched. You can set up separate accounts for a number of different children.
I doubt this app (or at least the individual appisodes)
will be free much longer. This must be some type of testing phase. Either that
or it’s all a massive hook to make sure we can’t live without Leo and friends.
Brooklyn might be there already. I asked her what she liked about Leo’s Pad and
she said she likes how Leo does some stuff and then she gets to do some stuff…
And she also really likes Cinder, the dragon. We have had the app a few weeks
now and there has not been a new appisode in that time; I really hope Kidaptive is planning updates regularly.
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