We’re super psyched to say this: Toontastic was just added to Apple’s iPad App Store Hall of Fame!

It’s quite the honor. Since Toontastic launched in the App Store back in January, ‘tooners across the world have made more than 150,000 cartoons in places as far off as Korea and Kalamazoo while cumulatively spending nearly five years making cartoons inside the app! So before we head out for a celebratory ice cream cone, we want to thank all you awesome cartooners out there for playing with Toontastic and giving us wicked good ideas to make it better with each version!

We’re pretty psyched to announce this: today, we’ve released a major new version of Toontastic featuring an all new ToonTube. Go download the latest version of Toontastic by heading over to iTunes and update or install it on your iPad.

Our monkeys have traveled far and wide to add a boat-load of new features including:

- Explore cartoons made by children across the globe in the new “World” view in ToonTube
- Watch the top toons for each merit badge category in “Featured”
- See the videos you’ve uploaded to ToonTube and if you’ve earned merit badges in “My Toons”
- Find cartoons on ToonTube by title or username in “Search”
- Show your love and “Like” a cartoon from the app to help your fellow tooners earn their merit badges!
- Share cartoons from the app directly to Facebook, Twitter & Email to friends and family

All this along with a handful of bits of polish, speed improvements and bug fixes!

We’re big believers in the power of storytelling here at Launchpad Toys – not just creating, but sharing and learning through the stories of others in our Global Storytelling Network for Kids. We hope you and your kids will agree!

With school out for summer, we’ll be checking in with a number of teachers using Toontastic across a variety of classroom activities and curricula. Last week, Leah LaCrosse shared her experiences with cartooning in Science Class. This week, Katie Kelley of Hazeldale Elementary and Peachy Speech shares her perspective on how she uses Toontastic to help kids with speech, language, and social communication delays learn proper pronunciation.

Part 1: The Story Map

I’ve been using Toontastic with my students with speech, language and social communication delays and wanted to find a way to maximize their learning experience while using the app. I started introducing some additional supports to help students make more developed story lines and have better organization when creating cartoons. The goals we are targeting are to be able to create a story in a logical sequence, initiate novel ideas, take turns, use new vocabulary and include descriptive language. (more…)

We’ve had a lot of fun this spring pilot testing Toontastic in a number of Bay Area classrooms across a range of disciplines from Middle School Spanish to Elementary Storytelling. One class at Bel-Aire Elementary in Tiburon, CA just finished up a unit on the California Gold Rush and used Toontastic to create their final reports, posting a number of their cartoons to ToonTube. We were really impressed by the quality of the drawings, the characterization, and the range in storylines. Way to go! The class’ teacher, Susie Negro, had this to say about the unit:

“The unit of study is the Gold Rush. The children did many things for this unit. One was reading the book, By the Great Horn Spoon. Children then wrote their own Gold Rush stories. From that, they worked in pairs to animate/narrate one story. It was a fun way to end the unit.”

We’re celebrating a fun milestone this week: 100 days since the release of Toontastic. Amazingly enough, this corresponds with another significant achievement by our legion of Playful Storytellers: 100,000 Cartoons Created. Way to go kids! We’re pretty psyched here at Mission Control (though Crazy Bearde keeps whining about his peg-leg being worn out).

Woot Woot! We just received word here at Mission Control that Toontastic has been awarded a Parents’ Choice Silver Honor Award! It’s been an exciting year for our fledgling startup and this is quite the cherry on top. In traditional awards ceremony fashion, we’d like to take a minute to thank the academy and our incredible team for all the long days and nights of coding, monkey sketching, kid-testing, and general shenanigans. Oh, and our moms too. Thanks moms!

Today we unveiled a new and much-requested feature on ToonTube: HTML Embed Codes! For those of you not familiar with embedding, you can now share cartoons directly on your website or blog by pressing the “plus” button on the cartoon’s toolbar. This will produce a small snippet of HTML code that you can cut and paste onto your page for everyone else to see (just like YouTube and other video sharing sites).

In the spirit of sharing, here’s a great cartoon posted by Emma001 from the Netherlands. Our friend Saskia Van Gendt was kind enough to translate the cartoon into English: (more…)

One of the most exciting parts of the past few weeks here at Launchpad Toys has been the incredible support and positive feedback from educators around the world. Rarely a day goes by without an email from an enthusiastic teacher with great ideas for lesson plans, curricula, and feature updates – and so we thought we’d create a community for everyone out there using Toontastic as a learning tool in classrooms, after-school programs, and homeschool settings. We’ll be piloting the “Classroom Community” over the next few weeks, but if you’re a teacher, tutor, or homeschooler and you’re interested in participating in our Pilot Program, please email us at howdy@launchpadtoys.com!

It’s been a heckuva’ week for us here at Launchpad Toys and for Toontastic, our Creative Learning and animation app for kids. Since launching seven days ago, Toontastic has been featured by Apple and has climbed the charts to as high as #19 in paid iPad Apps and #3 in the education category, picking up 5100 users along the way. Check out our post where we talk about those numbers and more here.

And it’s on! We woke up this morning to find Toontastic featured by Apple and charging its way up the iTunes charts. We’re thrilled, of course, to hear that people like the app, but the most exciting part of all this is definitely the incredible diversity of cartoons going up on ToonTube – the first step towards our goal of world domination… I mean “A Global Storytelling Network for Kids, by Kids”. Here’s one of our favorites so far!

It’s been a great week here at Launchpad Toys with the release of Toontastic and a whole lot of great feedback from reviewers and our many new users, but the best part of it all has definitely been waking up each day to watch the incredible new cartoons kids are posting on ToonTube. It’s like Saturday Morning Cartoons EVERY DAY. So, in an effort to showcase some of the great work we’re seeing, we created a Toontastic YouTube Channel. Enjoy!

We’re deeply sorry to those affected by the Y2K11 squid issue found earlier today in beta tests. Leaving more than one squid on the animation screen for extended periods will result in the squids multiplying on their own. Please remove one of the squids or wait until tomorrow when the bug disappears.

Also, Happy New Year!

Love,
Your friends at Launchpad Toys