The following article was written in partnership with Dan Donahoo of Wired’s GeekDad.com and appears in the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop’s iLearn Report, released 1/12/12.

Today’s mobile platforms enable developers to create more engaging and empowering content than ever before – groundbreaking games, toys, and tools for kids to play, learn, grow, and develop. In order to achieve the great potential of this market, however, it’s time for parents, educators, and developers to collectively reassess our pricing model: an expected price point of $.99 is not sustainable.

A “Top 50” Education app might have 100-200 downloads a day. Through regular updates, good social media support, and a strong fan base, a great app might hope to stay in the Top 50 for six months to a year. At $.99, that translates to $12K-$50K in revenue (revenue after 30% platform margin). With annual development/support costs ranging from $20K-$200K+, we’re quickly approaching a critical juncture in children’s media. We can (a) increase revenue, (b) consolidate, (c) reduce quality/depth/cost, or (d) supplement income through advertising and commercial branding.

If parents, educators, and developers truly value high-quality commercial-free educational content, then we must work together to identify and embrace a new pricing model that will sustain a diversity of developers to build innovative and creative content for our children. The simple answer would be to raise prices, but that’s shortsighted as upfront fees can inhibit parents from taking chances on original content and lead to more traditional licensing and advertising-driven markets like those of the toy and video game industries.

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We LOVE to share stories of teachers using Toontastic in the classroom. (Seriously! email us anytime if you’d like to share your story!) Today’s guest contribution is written by Michael Berry, Principal at Richmond Elementary in Richmond, Vermont.

I use my iPad, like other administrators, to make certain parts of my job and day more efficient and mobile.  I take notes on it, pictures, video, send emails, upload blog posts, tweet, etc.  You get the idea.  I do occasionally check out classroom apps to see if they are worth anything or something that I might pass on to others, but it was only last night and today that I purposely identified a very tangible and real area of use that I wasn’t tapping into.  Storytelling.

As a principal I try to connect with students whenever I can.  I have regular check in’s with students as well as the time that I spend in classrooms, on the playground and in the lunch room.  I haven’t used my iPad as a tool during these quieter times with students…until today!

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The following editorial is featured today on theiPhoneMom.com and the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop as part of our Spooky Story Contest.

Four Steps to Designing Toys for Creative Play

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 – how to invent a toy that will not only entertain, but ultimately empower kids to design and share their own imaginative inventions.

Today we present four easy steps for all you budding toy (and digital toy) designers to do for the next generation of kids as LEGO and so many others did for us: inspire and scaffold imagination.

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Hullabaloo abounds today with the release of Pediatric’s study on the effects of “fast paced” cartoon television on 4-year-olds’ attention spans. The study shows that, of 60 kids tested, 4-year-olds who watched 9 minutes of Spongebob Squarepants performed measurably worse on mental function tests than those who watched “slower paced” cartoons or drew pictures for the same 9 minute span.

Many parents, teachers, and researchers have long attested that certain forms of children’s media lead to attention deficit, but there has been little scientific evidence to-date to rebuke the American Academy of Pediatric’s claim that “a screen is a screen” (see: In Defense of Digital Play). Pediatric’s study, however limited, is an important milestone in demonstrating what seems obvious to us here at Launchpad Toys: All Children’s Media are Not Created Equal. (more…)

Diane Darrow is a good friend, an excellent teacher at Bel-Aire Elementary in Tiburon, CA, and a newly minted Apple Distinguished Educator. As a devout follower of Bloom’s Taxonomy, Diane is on a mission to turn tablets like the iPad into tools for content creation and not just content consumption. Needless to say, we’ve really enjoyed working with her classroom to improve Toontastic for schools.

Diane just started a new blog series on Edutopia.org where she’s reviewing/categorizing top educational apps through Bloom’s lens. She published her first editorial yesterday (Remembering) – be sure to stay tuned for Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and (our favorite) Creating!

Dan Donahoo of WIRED’s GeekDad.com wrote this great piece on Intergenerational Play for the GeekDad blog this week as part of our ongoing Toontastic Travel Tales ‘Tooning Contest:

As we announced last week, GeekDad is thrilled to be working with Launchpad Toys to sponsor Toontastic’s Travel Tales ‘Tooning Contest for kids to create their own cartoons about their family’s summer travels using Toontastic for the iPad. Please see last week’s article for more information on how to participate and compete for an out-of-this-world LEGO Space Shuttle!

Toontastic is a great example of how mobile devices like the iPad can bring kids and parents together through Intergenerational Play. Technology as a learning tool has received its fair share of negative press. While recognising it is more engaging and immersive than television, the mix of computers, consoles and handheld devices have been regarded as lacking emotion, isolating and insular. But, this has more to do with the design of the tools themselves and how we have positioned them in our homes and our lives than the technology platforms themselves. Computers have been tucked in corners, or put in the kids room. We have encouraged the use of headphones to block out noise and place the tech user in their own aural world – shut off from our questions and engaging conversation. It doesn’t have to be like this. Sure, we can use iPads for some respite sometimes, but an app like Toontastic shows that we can play with our children using technology. We can laugh and engage with technology as an enabler.

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This month’s WIRED Magazine features a great article on the rise of Khan Academy – a phenomenally impactful Bay Area startup that’s using low-fidelity instructional videos to target a range of k-12 curricula while working with schools to “flip” the traditional homework/schoolwork model. There are so many things about the Khan approach that just flat-out work for students today:

1. Khan’s videos are straightforward, engaging, and bite-sized. They feel more like personalized tutor sessions than lectures. He has an uncanny (unKhanny?) knack for breaking complex and imposing subjects into approachable, graspable concepts.
2. Khan’s “flipped” model enables teachers to outsource their lectures as homework and focus their classroom time on personalized learning. This is great for kids who need their teacher’s guidance and attention, great for teachers as they get more 1-on-1 time with their students, and takes pressure off parents as homework tutors.
3. The almost “homemade” nature of the videos matched with the incredible distribution power of the internet blends the engagement of personalized tutoring with the scalability of textbooks – in fact, it far exceeds the scalability of textbooks.

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One of the trickier parts of designing interfaces for kids is that “expertise” goes out the window every 2-3 years. A 10-year-old today that has grown up navigating the Web via mouse has drastically different expectations from a 4-year-old trained on iPad games, let alone a 30-year-old designer reared on 14.4K modems and dial-up bulletin boards. This makes UI/UX design quite challenging – one has to be able to look beyond their own (broad and outdated) expectations and understand how a digital native might see their interface, all while identifying the visual metaphors and conventions relevant to an audience with very limited experience/memory. (more…)

Lisa Wong graduated with a degree in English Lit and Communication from Berkeley and finds it odd to write about herself in the third person. She has been  an artist in the video game industry for 18 years (OH MY GOD – says Lisa) and has worked at various start-ups, Lucasarts, and 2K Sports. She now works at Sony PlayStation in R&D and reflects today on the roles of Play and Failure in nurturing Creativity.

A really long while back, Andy asked if I would write for the Launchpad Toys blog about our conversations on Creativity and the intersection of Play and Video Games. I was flattered and said “sure!” As a veteran of the Video Game Industry, I thought it’d be very easy and fun. So, I sat down to write.

Since I’m not a journalist or a scientist, I knew I couldn’t offer any new data. In fact,upon reflection, I was pretty sure that Andy far surpassed me in expertise and erudition when it came to these subjects. On top of that, every time I started to write something, the NY Times would publish an article about creativity, learning, or the importance of play. (Really. Try it. Google “creativity”, “NY Times”,“learning”, “play.”) (more…)

This month’s WIRED Magazine (Cover: The Mental Machine) features a fantastic article by Thomas Goetz on cognitive processing and behavioral change: The Feedback Loop. The idea of the Feedback Loop is both straightforward and well-established (computer scientists, educators, and psychologists like Stanford’s Albert Bandura have studied it since the 1960’s): as Goetz describes it, giving people a clear goal and a means to evaluate their progress toward that goal greatly increases the likelihood that they will achieve it. In short, real-time feedback (even without consequence) drives behavioral change, be it the Toyota Prius’ dashboard challenging you to conserve gas or the radar display on the side of the road guilt-tripping you into slowing down through a School Zone. (more…)

Leah Lacrosse is a 5th Grade teacher at Woodlands School in Huron, Ohio. She’s been using Toontastic with her students and writes today to share her experience using storytelling as a teaching tool for science. Check out her AMAZING challenge and her class’ cartoons!

Imagine a room full of 10-11 year old science students, just finishing up with research on a topic, person, or experiment of their choice. The school year is ending, and this is the Independent Study Phase. For the last week, the students have been asking and answering questions. Using their iPads, they have done the work to become the experts in their chosen area. So, the students have the content, and now they want to showcase it. They want to CREATE! (more…)