two and younger; three years later, there were 750. According to the NPD Group, sales of toys billed as educational were up 50 percent in 2003 over 2002, the only toy category whose sales increased in a relatively slack market. Indeed, while overall toy sales have been flat or slightly declining in recent years, infant and toddler toy sales are seeing single-digit growth year after year.
To get a visceral sense of how the baby genius phenomenon has saturated the marketplace, you need only meander through the aisles of any baby superstore in the United States. Such is the demand for baby gear that even as massive toy-store chains like Toys “R” Us fold, baby-only emporiums such as Babies “R” Us and buybuy BABY flourish. There you’ll find a huge selection of cognitively stimulating mobiles, developmentally appropriate rattles, vibrating bouncy seats, educational baby videos, and crib attachments that soothe with classical music — all with packaging that highlights the lessons or special advantages that each product claims. LeapFrog can take a great deal of credit for pushing the baby genius movement forward, and its history and corporate culture offer a window into the anatomy of that world.
LeapFrog’s advertising tag line is “Learn Something New Every Day!” and it is admittedly religion within the corporate walls. At LeapFrog you hear the word “learning” invoked so often, by everyone from public relations assistants to high-ranking executives, that you wonder if the word means something more formal and monolithic here than it does elsewhere, the way “enlightenment” is used in a general way by most of us but has quite a specific meaning for practitioners of Buddhism or yoga. Founded by a former technology company executive, LeapFrog, launched in 1995, made its meteoric mark as one of the first companies to capitalize on crossing the educational toy market with the technology industry, producing what are often called “interactive toys” or “smart toys.” In the most basic sense, these are playthings with low-cost electronic chips embedded underneath a layer of soft material or plastic. When the chip is activated, the toy gives an aural or visual response; this cause-and-effect dynamic represents interactivity. What this translates to in toyland is generally gizmos that beep, play electronic ditties, and flash colorful lights, usually with numbers or letters emblazoned on them.
Presenting early academic skill activities in an electronic toy has come to define LeapFrog’s specific brand of learning. But it has also played a substantial role in transforming the definition of “learning” in the minds of consumers as well as the major toy producers. Today, when consumers are asked in surveys to describe an “educational” or “learning” toy, many mention an electronic gadget that displays a sequence of numbers or letters. Only a small segment of consumers prefers crafts or open-ended playthings, such as building blocks or dolls, to learning toys. According to analysts and marketers, LeapFrog’s marketing efforts have convinced customers from all walks of life that an electronic device is not just an educational toy but the educational toy. Such toys attract a wide customer base — what marketers call “mass and class” — low-income buyers as well as well-educated upper-middle-class consumers. According to LeapFrog’s own market research, and also focus groups conducted by Scholastic, LeapFrog products are especially popular with foreign-born Latina and Asian mothers for whom English is a second language, who believe that the toys will teach their children to speak English. These mothers are willing to pay a premium for LeapFrog products, often forgoing other toys or educational materials, such as books.
LeapFrog’s success, and its brand of “learning,” has had monumental repercussions in the toy industry. Just seven years after it was founded, LeapFrog became the third-largest toy maker in the country, behind Mattel (number one) and Hasbro. LeapFrog’s popularity forced the hands of Mattel’s and Hasbro’s early childhood divisions, Fisher-Price and Playskool, respectively. Largely because of LeapFrog’s popularity, Fisher-Price and Playskool now offer toys for babies or toddlers that feature electronics and claim to offer some type of academic lesson. According to toy-business executives and analysts, buyers for the large retail stores have come to believe that infant and toddler toys claiming to teach early academic skills produce the most profit. Toy makers explain that when they show toys that don’t promise to help a child learn, the buyers refuse to stock them. One high-level toy designer showed a group of major chain buyers a stuffed animal whose body parts — eyes, nose, and so on — were named on labels stitched into the fabric. The primary purpose of the toy was to help parents teach their babies the parts of the body. But, the designer said, the buyers balked: “They said, ‘Mothers don’t want to teach their children about their bodies. That’s not learning. Mothers want their babies to know the alphabet. Put ABC on it, and we’ll think about it.’” The company acquiesced, even though letters and numbers had no relation to the focus of the toy. It is sold today as a toy that promotes learning.
NO “LEARNING” TOYS
LeapFrog producers cringe at stories like this, even though they may ostensibly be good for business. The producers argue that slapping numbers and letters on a toy does not lead to learning. The company prides itself on the research behind each toy. Starting with the flagship product, the LeapPad, for which it is still best known, all LeapFrog’s subsequent learning products — ranging from TurboTwist Handhelds for middle-schoolers to Leap’s Phonics Railroad for toddlers — have been based to some degree on academic research. LeapFrog producers are passionate about research. They read stacks of educational journals and attend academic conferences. The company pays a number of professors in the field of education to consult on toy design. In fact, the LeapPad was inspired by a Stanford professor’s research on preliteracy. While launching LeapFrog, the founder, Mike Wood, consulted with the reading specialist Robert Calfee (who has chaired LeapFrog’s Educational Advisory Board since the company’s founding) and learned that preliteracy skills depend on “phonetic awareness.” That is, before children can learn how to read, they need to develop the specific understanding that words are composed of strings of smaller sounds. Supporting phonetic awareness is what adults versed in reading to children are doing, usually without thinking about it. As they read, they listen for the child to repeat a word she finds interesting; when she does, they enthusiastically repeat the word, too, and they sound it out slowly and clearly. For example, a child might point to a picture of a ladybug in a book and try to pronounce the word herself: “Yay-dee-buh!” In response, the adult might happily affirm: “Yes, that’s right! That is a LAY-dee-bug! A LAY-dee-bug!”
With the LeapPad, Wood set out to replicate electronically that encouraging of phonetic awareness and, beyond that, to achieve electronically what every book-loving adult does when reading to young children: sound out words, ask questions about characters, repeat favorite sections over and over again. Physically, the LeapPad is a booklike hardware and software unit designed for four- to eight-year-olds. A plastic base houses a touch-sensitive web of electronics as well as a low-cost sound chip. The software component is not a disk containing a program but a series of interactive books made of specially coated paper, similar to the material used for shipping pouches. The books fit into the plastic base and the two components work in tandem. When a child uses the stylus tethered to the base and touches one of the pictures or icons in the book, she can have the book read to her or hear each word, as well as its phonemes, pronounced. A child can use the stylus to point to an assortment of icons to activate even more reading-related activities.
But replicating what has always been a fluid, enjoyable experience for adult readers and young listeners turned out to be a very complicated technological task and a major graphics design challenge. Where a parent or other caregiver would naturally follow a child’s interest, asking her spontaneous questions about a particular appealing character, for example, the inert LeapPad can only simulate interactivity. To do this effectively, product designers had to presume that the child using it might be interested in everything, so they had to anticipate every question, or as many as possible. A great deal of stuff — icons, instructions, questions — had to be packed onto every page, with the result that a LeapPad “book” resembles a children’s book only in that it has pages.
Engineering the maximum percentage of learning per square inch of toy became the mission of LeapFrog under Wood’s leadership (he was ousted
