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One of Pia’s Christmas presents was LeapFrog’s “Tag” Reading System.

The Reading System consists of two components: 1) The “Tag” reader/pen and 2) one or more special books that can be used with the reader. The kit I ordered came with Dr. Seuss’ classic “The Cat in the Hat”. At the same time I ordered a few more books to keep her interested.

After installing the batteries, we had to connect the pen via USB cable to a PC and download the book contents to the pen’s Flash memory. According to the manufacturer, the pen can hold up to 10 books at the same time. Besides the USB connector, the pen also has an on/off switch, volume controls and a headphone socket.

Pen in hand, book in front of you and you can get started. I’m still not sure how the technology actually works, but the pen seems to “read” encoded information using infrared light. That information is invisible to the human eye. Point the pen at any word in a book and it will slowly pronounce that word for you. Dragging the pen across a sentence will slowly read word after word.
Pia read through all her books that way, really picked up some new words and was able to recognize them in other (non-LeapFrog) books.

Besides reading at your own pace, the device offers a number of other modes. One of them just reads the whole book to you (almost like listening to an audio book) and it seems to be Pia’s least interesting option, because instead she would rather have me read the book to her. What she does like is the “games mode”, where each book offers several different games. For “The Cat in the Hat”, for example, she has to find as many drawings of the hat as quickly as possible.

All this is also tied into a rewards system. Read a complete book, find more than 10 hats and other actions unlock rewards that are associated with a book. The pen will notify the kid when a new reward has been unlocked and suggests to connect the pen to the computer to find out what the reward is. Sometimes it’s add-on material (printable bookmarks, coloring pages, etc.) and sometimes it is an interactive (Flash) game that she can play on the PC.

To round it all off, parents also get a detailed view at how a child is using the system. The LeapFrog website has a “Learning Path” section that provides that information. The pen seems to keep track of every action a child has taken since the last time it was connected to the PC. That information is uploaded to LeapFrog’s website, analyzed and presented in a number of different ways to parents. On the front page of “Learning Path” I saw this today:

You can drill down a lot more and find very detailed information about your kids progress (or non-progress). I have no idea how sound that information is from an academically point of view, but it appears as if they (LeapFrog) did spend some time on the system. Granted the same information can be used for very targeted advertising, but I’m ok with that under those circumstances.

The Pia Score on the “Tag” Reading System: A