Reading is important here at The Pond, LeapFrog’s headquarters facility in northern California.

Our business started with the premise that we could help parents get their kids into reading….and most LeapFroggers are passionate about either education or reading, or both.

How is it that someone becomes passionate about reading? While I’m not an educator by training, our on-staff educators and our Educational Advisory Board of experts advise, and our 10 years of experience working with parents and kids shows…kids who learn to read and learn to enjoy reading while they’re young stick with it for the rest of their lives.

I started reading early as part of competitiveness at school. I wanted to read faster, read more stories and books, and get better reading test scores than other kids in my class….it seemed important at the time, and that’s how my reading career began.

Eventually reading better and faster than other kids became less my passion and, instead, I found topics that directed my passion for reading. Adventure and flight and amateur science were, for me, topics that captured my imagination and ultimately filled the bookshelves of my little room in the house. This included the classic Mark Twain story of Tom Sawyer, but also the series of books about Tom Swift, and those of British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his famous Sherlock Holmes mysteries of scientific deduction (the original CSI, perhaps?). There were also books, many, many books, about flight, airplanes, flying, and great pilots…like Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, or famous Alaskan bush pilot Richard Reeves.

Ultimately, perhaps it was these interests that led me to study math and physics, and to train to become an engineer. Perhaps it was these books that led me to work on the first laser fusion machine, or to build an airplane from scratch, to learn to fly airplanes, to teach flying, and way later to run an airline (Swissair).

Perhaps it was this focus on reading, and on the importance of learning through reading that brought me to LeapFrog……where education, and bringing kids happily into reading is our Be-All, and End-All.

Jeff Katz
LeapFrog CEO

Take the LeapFrog quiz today to learn what profession your child could potentially become based on their characteristics and behavior today. Visit: http://www.leapfrog.com/tag/ [Edited by: LeapFrog Paul]

You may wonder who comes up with the ideas for the various products at a company like LeapFrog. Is there some elf at the North Pole? Some teacher turned mad scientist who we lock in a back room somewhere? Or do we have people in white coats watching children play from behind one-way glass?

Except for the elf at the North Pole (he retired in 2003), the answer to the questions above is yes—but there is more.

Creating new products is a process, and some parts of it are, as you’d expect, fairly sophisticated. We hire lots of creative people, and they have diverse backgrounds—from design to education, entertainment, toy design, game design, and engineering, to name but a few. And we, like most consumer companies, immerse ourselves in research of all types. 

We really do have rooms with one-way glass where we can watch kids (and their parents) play with our fun learning products (but our researchers stopped wearing white coats when the elf retired).

Tag Junior is an example of a product that came out of formal research and roughly ten years’ experience helping kids learn and love to read. We know that young kids (ages 2 to 4) have a different inherent interest in words, letters and the idea of reading than do kids who are 4, 5 or 6. They also have a different ability to do things like turn a page and hold a device in their hand, and certainly the topics that “float their boat” are different, too. All this led us to develop Tag Junior and Tag Junior board books in a way that is substantially different than our popular Tag Reading System. Note, for example, that the shape of Junior is designed for a small child’s hands.

My Pal Scout, our new customizable plush learning toy for infants, came from a much simpler process. It came from a conversation among our product designers and sales people, who wanted to do something “new for the youngest LeapFrog customer and the newest LeapFrog parent.” And it also came from the poking and prodding of the CEO—that would be me. It was important to me that if we must make (and sell) a plush toy, let’s make it very LeapFrog, meaning it had to be connected to our Learning Path. I didn’t want to make the product un-cute or complicated, but I did want it to be something that made clear to a mom how much her child really could learn from a plush toy. Even a toy that is seemingly simple or cuddly can be made interesting each time her child picked it up and squeezed it, and by connecting Scout, moms can make it say a child’s name, update the songs it plays, choose a child’s favorite color and more.

At the end of the day, we think both Tag Junior and My Pal Scout will be successful products, though each came to life through a very different process.

Thanks for reading the Frog Blog.  I'll be back soon with updates and views from our Pond.

Jeff Katz
LeapFrog CEO

As seen on Huffington Post

As President Obama returns from a week abroad and an immersion into the issues of the world, he'll again take to defending the merits of his stimulus plan and his budget on the home-front. Underlying one of his biggest priorities, education reform, sits the kernel idea that investing in education will produce long-term economic gains for our country. So aside from simply wanting American children to be better educated, we must ensure that we can fill our seat at the global "big kids table" for decades to come.

While the pundits agree on many of the essential ingredients of education reform, few can agree on the path we should take and the role technology should play.

Technology in the classroom has been argued by some as being, at worst ineffective and, at best, distracting. I'd encourage those folks to talk to a child who used technology to learn to read, or to an adult who used it to learn English as a second language so they could get a job and support their family. Or, I'd encourage the skeptics to evaluate how some of the leading school districts in our country and in leading countries abroad use technology to advance the capabilities of their kids. Since technology has touched nearly all aspects of our lives, do we really believe that it can be anything other than a fundamental part of school reform? Can it really be the case that the "digital divide" begins in our schools?

News flash to education pundits.....America is far and away the leader in technology and its application. To say technology is not a critical aspect of advancing America to the head of the global class room, is to say we cannot use our greatest competitive capability to advance our greatest potential resource for the future...our children.

Done "right'' its clear that technology is a good thing, and leaning on technology is an essential thing.

In a recent U.S. Department of Education study, LeapFrog's LeapTrack product was the only technology-based tool reviewed that demonstrated significant improvements in students' standardized reading test scores. Some would argue that a single winner doesn't bode well for the category. In the competitive world where I live, if something works you buy it, and you learn from it - you don't ignore it. With the administration's renewed commitment to creating a culture of learning for our children, we should celebrate any tool that has been proven to help them succeed. LeapTrack and Learning Path, its consumer-facing counterpart, are tools that work, and there are others available as well.

When you marry innovation and the boundary-free teaching potential of the Internet with the passion and commitment of teachers - students will win. Every time. Period. We're in the business of creating platform technologies that engage kids in the learning process, as well as Web-based solutions like Learning Path that help parents see how their child is progressing. These are powerful and effective tools that are helping kids advance and that make learning fun. We must continue to invest in innovative ways to get curriculum to these new "digital learners" who can absorb and process information in ways we haven't even discovered yet. We've got to use these tools as a basis for quickly collecting the data that describes how the kids, the teachers, and the schools are performing so that we can pinpoint how to improve performance. Without such tools we'll be using stone knives and bearskins when our country's allies and foes alike are using netbooks and broadband.

Our education system has to stay relevant and it has to get beyond its current national level of embarrassment and into a position of national pride. If we don't invest in the technology now that's required to do this, then we're assuring ourselves a place in the detention hall of the global schoolhouse. We don't want to be there and we don't need to be there if we get going now.

Jeff Katz

LeapFrog CEO

If you have kids, if you have friends or relatives with kids, or if reading is a favorite past-time, then you would probably care about National Reading Month if you knew a bit more about it.

LeapFrog has, since about 1999, been in the “reading business.” The founder of our company had a passion that drove its formation with an almost single-minded mission demanding that no child should struggle to learn to read.....and that expanded over the years to include all learning.

As for me, well, reading was the first thing I can remember being good at, and competitive at. I can recall that from primary school forward I raced to read every book and raced through every reading comprehension exercise I could get my hands on. I remember thinking that it was very, very important to get more gold stars for each book I read, and more gold stars for each story element I grasped from each book, and more gold stars for each word I could recognize, and more gold stars from each word I could spell…..even though I don’t think the gold stars were redeemable for anything but a big smile from my teacher or my mother.

And reading has been a big thing in the Katz family. My wife is an author (she uses her maiden name, Karen Ray), writing stories ranging from go-to-bed books like "Sleep Song," to serious novels for young adults, like "To Cross A Line." We also personally support innovative non-profits, such as Room to Read, which build libraries around the world.

At the other end of our age spectrum, my 93-year-old father is a voracious reader of history. Of all the ailments he encountered in his nonogenarian life (kidney failure and heart failure among them), none were more traumatic than glaucoma because it eliminated his ability to read. A few months ago he underwent successful cataract removal surgery and I’ve not seen him happier or healthier in attitude because now…..he can read again!

It’s a well-known fact that to succeed, and certainly to contribute to solve the many, many challenges we’ll face in the future, our kids have to be good learners, and to learn they have to read. At LeapFrog, we “set the bar” for ourselves and design our products so kids don’t just learn to read, they learn to love reading! Feedback from our customers and a scroll through our online user-generated videos of kids using our products suggests that we are pretty darn good at that.

So, what is National Reading Month? Why are we involved? Why should you get involved? Well, National Reading Month is an effort that commences in early March with Read Across America day, celebrating the birthday, life and literature of Dr. Theodore Seuss Geisel and promoting the importance of reading to millions across the United States. LeapFrog is involved because our whole business is based on the belief that nothing is more important than getting our kids to read. Since LeapFrog sales indicated we make the world’s most popular reading product, the Tag Reading System, and Tag recently won the coveted U.S. Educational Toy of the Year award, it only makes sense that we’d get on board!

All you have to do is go to LeapFrog.com/readingmonth and enter the number of hours you pledge to read to your child. In return, we will recognize your pledge with a printable certificate, downloadable hints and tips about how you can make reading with your child a fun and engaging event, and savings coupons for LeapFrog products.

It’s simple. It’s fun. It’s about reading. And it’s our way of continuing our commitment to helping children learn – and love – to read.

Please sign up and take the opportunity to let the Parents Community know why you feel it’s important to pledge during National Reading Month. Feel free to get friends, schoolmates, and relatives involved in our reading pledge, too. When it comes to National Reading Month, more is certainly better.

Thanks for reading the Frog Blog. I’ll be back soon with updates and views from our Pond.

Jeff Katz

LeapFrog CEO

I wanted to focus this week’s post on something that I think is very, very important to what makes LeapFrog special…the Learning Path.

Last year we launched what I believe is a  groundbreaking new part of all LeapFrog products. It is based on technology that we have been using in thousands of classrooms across America, now made super simple (and free) for the home. With our exclusive Learning Path, when your child uses one of our “connected” products (Tag Reader, Leapster2, Didj, Crammer…and more coming later this year), you get insights on what your child is learning, what you as a parent can do to make that personal learning journey more fun, and what the next learning step is for your child.

Learning Path for Toys?......Indeed, we’ve built out the Learning Path “pathstones” for all of our products. So, if you were to go to LeapFrog.com and click on Learning Path and then link a Learning Toy product, for example our Learn & Groove Alphabet Drum, you can see what developmental skills your child is benefiting from as she grooves along with this ever-popular product for toddlers. Each product is represented on the Learning Path so that as your child develops you can literally “See The Learning” as it happens and also be better in sync with Tips and Tricks you can use to keep up with what is almost always a progression that amazes. But don’t just take my word for it, see what one of our Parents Community members thinks about the Learning Path.

Nope, the Learning Path hasn’t been a secret. We launched it last year and have had hundreds of thousands of parents get engaged in the learning and play activity of their children. But, starting this year you will see us begin to turn up the noise on Learning Path (yes, this blog post is part of that momentum….it’s my job) to make sure that all who have LeapFrog products know about it and understand the value of it, and those that have yet to consider purchasing one of our products know more about what makes our products so special.

We put a lot of tender loving care into all of our products. The Learning Path is an aspect of our products that we hope grows on you (and your children). So, if you’ve not yet had the chance to do so, please check out our Learning Path online and do feel free to post your own experience in our Parents Community. We would really appreciate that. And so would all the other hundreds of thousands of LeapFrog parents.

Until next time then,

Jeff Katz
LeapFrog CEO

This is my first blog post to the LeapFrog Parents Community, but I will be making regular updates from here on. If you didn’t already know it, LeapFrog is in the “learning and play” business. We take that mission very seriously, and as you might imagine, we also have some pretty serious fun here. Since 1999 we’ve been in the business of building products for kids from the ages of about six months to 12 years that inspire a love of learning, that help them progress on real and important learning fundamentals involving reading skill, number and math skill, language skill, geography, but also early development skill around colors, shapes, creativity, art, letter sounds......and we’ll soon be pushing into new learning subjects, like the environment, culture, basic science, music, and more.

What makes LeapFrog special? Why do more parents rate LeapFrog products higher than any other learning product in the U.S. marketplace? Here’s what I think......I think it’s because of the people who work here......we have a high percentage of people on our staff with backgrounds in education......teachers, education researchers, and we work with some of the leading university thinkers in education in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. We have some of the most talented creative directors who we work with at our headquarters and around the world......with expertise in software, in electronics, in computer architecture, and in human factors design. We even have our own Learning department led by a man (Dr. Jim Gray) with a PhD from Harvard who is a published researcher in his own right. Finally, I would say that many, if not most of our colleagues including brand and product managers, are parents, even parents of young children. Our people, simply put, live with our products during work and at home. They care, a great deal, about what they create and how well it does, or doesn’t work for your child and you.

Let me close my first post by encouraging you, our valued customers, parents, grandparents and teachers, to post your own experiences in our Parents Community. Sharing your stories and feedback, after all, is what it's all about.

Jeff Katz

LeapFrog CEO