Hi JoannaB,

I'd like to add to Jaeme's reply and respond to your Learning Path concerns.

1) As you say, game play is recorded by player profiles, rather than by the entire handheld, to enable parents to see results from siblings who might use the device. Because your son is the only user, you can link all of his player profiles to his footprint. Go to My Account and click Player Profiles. Any profiles he creates will be detected when you connect the Leapster2, so you'll be able to link them to his Learning Path footprint.

2) The Learning Path supports 45 Leapster Classic and Leapster2 titles. Of those, 14 have the ability to report skills included, time played, questions answered and percent correct. The remaining titles (Classic titles) can report skills included and time played.

Because the Path page shows skills in your child's titles, you will see colored stones on grades above your child's current grade. The colored stones represent all of the skills in your child's LeapFrog products, spanning the grade ranges of those products. It is designed to give you a window into the skills your child may be exploring through play, but it is not an assessment tool. However, I completely agree with your suggestions, and we'll be working on features to better show progress over time.

Finally, I want to thank you for posting such detailed feedback. I'll be watching the comments in this forum to continually improve the Learning Path so that we can provide parents with the most useful data possible. Your real user feedback is invaluable!

Ok, since nobody else has answered my question, I will answer it myself, since I have since then figured out a bit more about the Learning Path:

 As far as I can tell the Learning Path as currently developped is unfortunately pretty useless, at least for a user like myself. Here is why:

(1) I have a son who is not quite 3 years old, but already a very active Leapster user. He cannot be relied upon to sign in always with his own user name. Even worse, at least on one occasion he deleted his user name and created a new name happily pressing letters in a random sequency. Since he is the only user of the Leapster however, it would be nice if one could get Learning Path results that show all activity on his Leapster, but since the Learning Path is tied to a particular user name, it is pretty useless for us. As an aside, I resent the fact that one cannot delete a name unless there already are three usaer names on the Leapster. This means that I cannot delete my son's random names, leaving only his one real name as the only option.

(2) We own 15 Leapster cartridges thus far, but only one of them is Leapster 2 specific. It took me for ever to understand that the "Details" on Learning Path are only available for that one cartridge, since the other cartridges are listed in Learning Path as well. If the functionality of Learning Path is available only for Leapster 2 games, then I would rather the other games were not even listed on the Learning Path website. Even worse, the section of the website called "The Path" currently shows that my not-quite 3-year-old son has mastered the reading for third grade level, which is not true and ridiculous. What I suspect is happening is that the Path is constructed using the skills that are available on the cartridges rather than the skills actually shown by the child (?).  I would rather that the Path showed a skill-level that is less than my son's actual skill level, but that would accurately reflect skills that he is displaying when playing the games than for it to show ridiculously inflated skill levels that are not based on his actual abilities. This way I could see progress over time by seeing changes in the path, and even if this were based only on the one cartridge that we own that is made specifically for Leapster 2, that would be ok.

(3) I had accidentally created a duplicate footprint for my son, and could not figure out how to delete it, so I changed the second footprint to the name of my not yet born son and changed the age to Infant. Imagine my surprise when I got an email from LeapFrog informing me that my not yet born son had earned a "has earned a Shooting Star for exploring skills above his grade level." I really do not need this kind of inaccurate feedback!

I am still very happy with the Leapster 2 overall, but not with the Learning Path portion of it. Maybe it will become more useful when (a) my son is older; (b) we buy more Leapster 2 specific cartridges over time; and (c) the developers of the Learning Path significantly improve the software.