]]> http://launchpadtoys.com/blog/2014/12/apple-honors-telestory-as-one-of-the-best-apps-of-2014/feed/ 2 http://launchpadtoys.com/blog/2014/10/flipping-the-script-getting-kids-off-the-couch-and-creating-tv-with-telestory/ http://launchpadtoys.com/blog/2014/10/flipping-the-script-getting-kids-off-the-couch-and-creating-tv-with-telestory/#comments Wed, 15 Oct 2014 19:27:32 +0000 http://launchpadtoys.com/blog/?p=4032

This article was written for the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and can also be read on their blog here.

What if we could reimagine the iPad as an augmented reality camera for kids to act out their own stories – a costume box for the 21^st century?

Introducing… TeleStory

You’ve all heard the stats. One in three American kids are obese or overweight and will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lives. After diet and exercise, two of the biggest culprits in this epidemic are TV and gaming – the average 8-18 year-old spends 7.5 hours every day on entertainment media. American kids born after 2005 watch 35 hours of television each week and spend 7 hours a week gaming on phones and tablets alone. Meanwhile, only 1/3 of high-school students get the recommended amount of daily exercise. The correlation isn’t coincidental.

Beyond health, there are some pretty scary social effects too – outdoor play isn’t just good exercise, it’s a great place for kids to practice their “21^st century skills” – creating, constructing, and collaborating in the sandbox, the backyard, and the ball-field. Whether it’s assigning rules for kickball or roles in “Cops and Robbers”, communication skills developed through play are critical to child development… though the jury’s still out on mid-frag mom-jokes from frtblster2005.

At Launchpad Toys, we build “digital toys” like Toontastic that empower kids to create and share stories online. As mobile app developers, we’re proud to see kids so engaged with our tools, but also concerned that it might be at the exclusion of exercise and time outdoors. With this in mind, we set out a couple years ago to “put the mobile back in mobile gaming” – to create an app that encourages kids to turn off the TV, get off the couch, and run around outside. Instead of watching TV, what if kids could create their own TV shows in the backyard?

Today, we’re proud to announce TeleStory – the second app in our “Creative Suite for Kids” that enables kids to film and broadcast their own TV shows using digital costumes and real-time augmented reality settings and effects. Imagine all the role-play games you acted out as a kid, but captured on film to share with family and friends around the world. Our goal for the app was to design a creative lens for kids to reimagine, remix, and explore the world around them. We learned a lot in R&D and, with the hope of inspiring other developers to embrace “digital play”, we thought we’d share a few things we figured out along the way.

1. Creating > Editing

iMovie, Photoshop, Flash, Action Movie FX… there are dozens of great tools out there for creating video and motion graphics, but they’re all based on age-old ideas of editing and compositing – you film a video and then sit for hours cutting it up and overlaying effects to make your story more engaging.

With TeleStory, we quickly learned that this was a non-starter. 8-12 year-olds didn’t want to sit and edit, they wanted to play and create. We didn’t need to add glitz and glamour in post-production to make their stories more interesting – their stories were already amazing – we simply needed to create lenses to spark their imaginations in real-time and capture kids’ stories as they saw them in their heads. Over time we realized that we weren’t building a camera, but a catalyst for improv performance.

2. Building Blocks Aren’t Just for Little Kids

Here at Launchpad Toys, we think of our apps as the toys we always wanted as kids – tools to create cartoons, music, TV shows, and other media that we loved to watch but weren’t “grown-up” enough to make ourselves. The first step is always technical: how to redesign a “professional” creation experience (keyframe animation, video editing) to match how kids actually play and create (puppet theaters, dress-up play). The second step, however, is usually the most challenging: how to make abstract concepts like “story” and “TV show” accessible to creators of all ages.

Being Constructionist minded, our answer is to break these concepts down into LEGO-like building blocks for kids to remix and reassemble as they see fit. In Toontastic, we use the Story Arc as a scaffold – splitting “cartoons” into Characters, Settings, a Setup, Conflict, Climax, and Resolution. TeleStory, however, was more challenging. What makes a TV show? There wasn’t a lot of literature on the matter, so we decided to give kids a simple camera/effects tool and ask them to create one themselves. At first there was a lot of running around and blasting things – not much in terms of cohesive story. In time though, we started to notice patterns in the form of “tropes” – pop-culture clichés like “Alien Overlord hijacks ship for ransom” and “Villain ties damsel to train tracks” – and re-centered the app around these classic scenes and “cue cards” as storytelling prompts. The results were remarkable – just as the Story Arc scaffolded 5-10 year-olds’ creative writing in Toontastic, pop-culture tropes gave our tween creators the building blocks they needed to improvise onscreen in TeleStory.

We released a new app today that you’re going to love. It’s called TeleStory and with it you can film and broadcast your own TV shows – spy adventures, space battles, music videos… check out our video!

How does it work?

1. Pick a scene to act out – maybe a lightsaber battle or a car chase?
2. Write your script and pick a costume to wear in your scene. What role will you play? A rockstar? A ninja?
3. Record LIVE with onscreen special effects and dozens of characters & settings!

Once you’re done you can broadcast your TV show on ToonTube to share with friends, family, and millions of kids around the world.

To all our wildly imaginative storytellers around the world: Thank You! Your creativity and humor inspire us every day and we can’t wait to see all your TeleStory adventures on ToonTube.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We’re excited to be featured on a great piece this morning by NBC’s TODAY show about how kids are playing a major role in designing the apps and games they play with.

Here at Launchpad Toys, we work closely with the Children’s Creativity Museum and the SF Friends School here in San Francisco to partner with kids to design, test, and evaluate apps as we build them. Thank you to all of Launchpad Toy Testers and the TODAY show for showcasing this fantastic trend in children’s media.

We’re teaming up with Gamestar Mechanic next week at ISTE 2014 in Atlanta to host a workshop on game design with Toontastic: School Edition. In this workshop, teachers will learn how to prototype games with students using Toontastic, test and iterate, then build working games on Gamestar. What better way to get students excited about Computer Science than through game design?

For everyone that’s not able to attend, we also created a “Toytivity” outlining all the steps and a worksheet for students to design their games on paper before prototyping them in Toontastic. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD.

Check out our prototype created in Toontastic (above) and our game built on Gamestar Mechanic!

TIP: Press ENTER to proceed through the instructions screens.

Tina Watson is a UK educator working with Toontastic in the classroom. She recently shared this story in UKED Magazine. You can see her students’ creations on ToonTube and read more about her creative uses of EdTech tools on her blog.

Learn about Toontastic: School Edition (50% off for schools) and other classroom resources on #LaunchpadEDU.

Having taught Media Studies & Film Studies in the FE sector for over ten years, I am well versed in teaching students how to analyse moving images and the practical skills associated with making their own moving image products.  Now that I work increasingly with primary pupils, I was keen to find ways of introducing moving images into my teaching and learning.   When I taught BTEC and A level students, we had whole terms to spend filming and editing, but now I needed to find something quick and easy that could be incorporated into a single lesson.  Being an EdTech enthusiast I naturally turned to the Apps store.  I dabbled with stop motion but found it very time consuming and was unconvinced that my pupils were learning a great deal.  Luckily I found Toontastic, an amazing animation App that has since become one of my most used Apps for educational use.  Toontastic allows pupils to select characters and settings to animate.  They then add their own voice recordings and choose music to add. The format of the App means that pupils are guided through the correct stages of writing a story, following the story arc. Here is how I have integrated Toontastic into my teaching practice.

Literacy

I have used the App in a number of ways for literacy work.  Pupils have created their own animated versions of traditional tales and fairytales. The App has a great bank of ready-made settings and characters suitable for this, or pupils can draw their own or import images from the camera roll.  For reluctant writers, this is a great way of engaging them in telling a story.  The tactile process of creating the animation on a tablet keeps pupils engaged and I have found that reluctant writers are more motivated to write up their story if they have created the animated version first.  It is easy to fall into the trap of viewing the use of the tablet and Apps in the classroom as the ‘add on fun bit’ at the end of the lesson once the ‘proper’ work has been completed; and we tend to think that we must get children to write the story first.  However, I have often found that creating the animation first works equally well if not better.  A child instinctively wants to ‘do’ or ‘say’ their story so why not let them do this first and then write it up?  By using this App I have integrated Pie Corbett’s Talk4Writing principles into my literacy work, allowing pupils to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally before reading and analysing and then writing their own version. With the increased use of EdTech tools in schools, we should ensure that we utilise these applications to enable us to apply such educational principles.

Alternatively, you can ask pupils to plan and write the story first before moving on to Toontastic to bring it to life.  Another way I have used it is to work with a pupil’s pre written story and then ask them to ‘fit’ their story into the story arc structure (the printable storyboards provided on the website are useful for this).  Working like this can help improve a pupil’s written structure as they realize that their writing needs amending to fit into the correct part of the story arc.   I tend to change the way I use the App according to the individual pupil and the writing objective.

Analysing the ‘mise en scene’ (what is in the scene) is a key part of media and film studies and was a fundamental part of the courses I taught to Post 16 students.   I have also found it useful to apply these analysis skills to literacy work with primary and younger secondary pupils when creating animations.  Asking pupils to analyse the movement, speech, costume, lighting and sound within the animation is a great way to develop their skills of inference and deduction (skills which can then be transferred to analysis of written texts).  I have used Toontastic to create animations of a character simply walking into a setting and saying something.  Each time they are dressed differently, their speech intonation is different and the music is different. I then ask pupils to analyse the mise-en-scene and discuss how different meanings can be created through these changes.  From here, I provide a short written extract from a text where meaning is inferred rather than explicit, and ask the pupil to create an animation from it.  Their choice of setting, costume, speech and music allows me to assess their interpretation of the text.  This approach worked well with a Yr. 9 pupil I was tutoring for English.  We were looking at an extract from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens and she was struggling to understand the more challenging language in the extract.  I asked her to create an animation version of the written extract, which allowed me to clearly see what elements she had interpreted correctly, and those she had not understood.  She had selected appropriately gloomy music and the figure expression of her characters indicated that she had correctly interpreted their feelings from the written piece.  From here, I then read out the extract and recorded it over her animation.  From here we were able to work on deciphering words and phrases she did not understand, and she then changed the animation to illustrate her understanding.  By the end of the task, she was confident enough to re-record the voice over herself and had a much better understanding of the inferences in the text.  I would envisage this activity working well with small, mixed ability groups in a larger class setting.

Numeracy

I like the novelty factor of using animation for maths, and it is an ideal format for placing math’s problems into real life scenarios.  Mathematical storybooks already exist (Spaghetti and Meatballs is a favourite of mine), so you could get your class to create an animated version of one of these.  The first maths animation I worked on was a scenario where I was a mum with two sons; one wanted to go to LEGOLAND for the day and the other wanted to go to Chessington World of Adventures.  I started the animation by providing the details of the discount offers that the two theme parks had.  The pupils then had to continue the animation by figuring out which was the best deal.  Their working out is shown within the animation and they orally explained and recorded their methods too.  They then created a scene to show which deal was the best and which theme park they ended up at!  Great fun.

You can upload and share your animations via Toontastic’s ‘ToonTube’ platform (all videos get e mailed to the teacher for approval before posting so you don’t have to worry about your pupils uploading inappropriate content).  You could get your class to share their maths animations with others around the world; or you could set up a maths challenge whereby you challenge another school to solve the maths problem posed within your animation.

I am going in to work with a school soon during their maths week.  They have invited parents in to talk to the children about how they use maths in their jobs.  I will then follow this up by working with the pupils on the Toontastic App to have them create animations based on the parent talks.  (I’ll post the animations onto ToonTube so you can see what they come up with!).

I hope I have encouraged you to see the potential for integrating animations into your lessons.  I especially love the simplicity and speed of using an animation app via a tablet in the classroom.  Often the thought of having to book out a room and setting up equipment for filming puts us off using the tools. As EdTech gains momentum I hope that more educators will use these tools to engage learners.

If you are based in London or Kent and are interested in having me come into your school to run a pupil animation workshop or train your staff, please contact me.

One of the best parts of working here at Launchpad Toys is hearing how creative teachers are using our tools in ways we never imagined. I recently had the pleasure of talking with one of our Toontastic Teachers, Maggie Powers, about how her preschool students transformed their classroom into their own interactive solar system using Toontastic cartoons and QR codes. Brilliant!

For more on digital storytelling in the classroom, check out #LaunchpadEDU and download Toontastic: School Edition for iPad.

So you turned your classroom into a space movie theater…

Maggie: In our Pre-K class, we wanted to find a way to help students create and share stories about what they were learning in their space unit. We realized that Toontastic would allow students to use a variety of space scenes and characters and also integrate themselves, into animated stories. After introducing the app to the students and discussing the general arc of most stories, I worked with students to help create their first space stories. We shared these with their peers and the students really enjoyed watching their friends’ work, especially as they began to replace the character faces with their own photos.

To make it easier for students to view each others’ stories whenever they wanted and have independent access, I decided to create QR codes linking to the stories on Toontube. I introduced QR (quick reference) codes to the Pre-K students and related them to something they have all seen, barcodes at the grocery store. Once the students understood the scanning process and knew where to find the QR code reader app, they were able to go up to any of the codes we placed around the room to view the Toontastic space stories their peers had created.

How did the kids respond? What benefits did you see?

Maggie: This activity helped students express their ideas and new knowledge about space through animated storytelling, a new medium for them. The students learned how to use the Toontastic app to create a beginning, middle, and end to their stories and how to take their own photos and add them into existing characters. We used this project as an opportunity for students to design and share creative stories and also some more factual ones, such as what to do when visiting the space center in the classroom.

Once we added the QR codes, the students learned how to use them as a tool to access their own and their peers’ stories independently so that they could listen and watch them whenever they wanted. I really liked how empowered the students felt to access their stories once they learned how to use the QR codes and I appreciated that the project reinforced the idea of using the iPad for creation (animated stories) and communication (sharing stories, accessed via QR codes).

Thanks Maggie for your inspirational work and please give your students an intergalactic high-five for us!

This story aired on the BBC News on 4/22/14.

Congratulations to The Specialists Guild, our SF neighbors and QA partner here at Launchpad Toys. We were thrilled to see their work highlighted last week on BBC News and are proud to team up with their dedicated squad of playful app testers. Keep it up guys!

With powerful new tools at their fingertips, educators today are breaking through school walls to connect classrooms to the real world and offer students perspective and context beyond their textbooks. Thanks to tools like the iPad and Google Hangouts, word problems and field trips are giving way to live video chats with NASA astronauts and collaborative online productions of Shakespeare that reinforce learning goals and have the potential to improve both transfer and student engagement. Inspired by the ingenuity of “connected classroom” teachers around the world, we set out this fall to explore how students might also benefit from connecting with other kids through shared storytelling and peer review. Today, we’re excited to share a short video about “Project PenPal”, a few takeaways we gathered from our exploration, and some tips for creating your own connected classrooms project.

At Launchpad Toys, we build creativity tools like Toontastic: School Edition that empower students of all ages to create and share content with kids around the world. Since releasing Toontastic three years ago, we’ve been amazed by the millions of creative stories students have drawn, animated, and narrated on our online network. The greatest surprise, however, has been the remarkable creativity of teachers bridging digital storytelling with math and science for students to create everything from geological reports to tutorials on fractions.

Moved by our “Toontastic Teachers”, we reached out this fall to a pair of schools (one in Ohio, the other in California) to explore an idea: what if we connected two science classrooms for students to create and peer-review animated lab reports? Might students learn from the insights, feedback, and stories of their peers just as they would a NASA astronaut? We know that it can be hard to teach concepts like “hypothesis” and “experimental design” – could we adapt Toontastic’s Story Arc (setup, conflict, climax and resolution) to scaffold students’ understanding of the scientific method and help them tell their own scientific stories (hypothesis, experiment, results and conclusion)?

Takeaways
Project PenPal was a success on many fronts. Students on both sides of the country took quickly to the project and became avid creators. Upon receiving feedback from their peers in Ohio, the California students took it upon themselves to create new reports from the ground up. After viewing the California students’ magnification projects, the Ohio students (who had been building robotic arms for space exploration) insisted (successfully) that their teacher extend the unit to include microscopic study of moon rocks. Their teacher, Leah LaCrosse, reported, “I cannot think of a better tool to get kids to write about science…” then added with a grin, “It takes a little bit longer, but the time that you spend pays off later.”

Whether the project truly pays off later through improved transfer will require more study, but we were happy to see students creating prolifically and clearly engaging with and responding to peer feedback. We credit two factors here – first, that the app provides a very personal and playful connection between students (voice recording, photos, drawings, etc.) and second, that it enables students of all ages to create, share, and iterate on their work quickly with minimal effort and lots of fun. Be it a poster, a comic, a movie, or a cartoon, apps like Toontastic enable today’s students to create engaging accounts of their work in a single class period, share it online, get feedback from other students 2000 miles away, and post a new iteration the next day. Content creation tools like PowerPoint have been in classrooms for decades, but few if any have offered the playful personalization or rapid iteration necessary to bridge the gap from a presentation tool to a social learning platform.

Our second question going into Project PenPal was whether Toontastic’s built-in Story Arc might help scaffold students’ understanding of the scientific method through “scientific storytelling”. Our teachers asked students to create cartoons outlining their hypothesis, experimental design, results, and conclusion – creating one scene for each section. The result was a series of videos that weren’t quite “stories”, but instead very compelling lab reports. We were encouraged by the thoroughness of the students’ presentations, but admittedly longed for a bit more of the backstory behind their investigations. For future projects we’ll explore hybrids of the two scaffolds.

Next Steps
The success of Project PenPal has inspired our team to push further on tools and frameworks for peer learning – not just in the classroom, but within our apps as well. With the help of our teachers in Ohio and California, we’ve created a toolkit for educators to connect their own classrooms and, thanks to our engineers-in-training in Ohio, we recently kicked off phase two of our exploration: prototyping constructive feedback tools for our four million playful storytellers on ToonTube to hone their creative writing skills and learn about the world around us through the stories of their peers.

If you have any questions about Project PenPal or using Toontastic in the classroom, please email us at educators@launchpadtoys.com.

Special thanks to Joel Knopf, Hannah Clemmons, Leah LaCrosse, and Mike Harms for steering this project and for inspiring playful (scientific) storytellers around the world.

We hosted a “Saturday Morning Cartoons” contest this weekend for all you playful storytellers out there to turn off your TV, get off the couch, and create YOUR OWN cartoons.

Your stories were so amazing that our voters had trouble picking a winner, so instead we decided to honor all of our participants with a highlight montage second only to… well… the greatest montage of all time.

Well done Toontastic Nation. You make EVERY MORNING feel like Saturday Morning!

Don’t worry teachers, Toontastic: School Edition is also on sale for $9.99, making Volume Purchase… wait for it… $4.99!

The All Access Pass includes 50+ playsets chock full of pirates, princesses, fire breathing monsters, and rescue heroes. You’ll also unlock the Toy Camera to add photos to your cartoons, the Special FX pack to create your own Hollywood blockbusters, ProtoToys for designing animated characters, and Video Export for saving your amazing cartoons to your computer or uploading to YouTube.

To unlock the app (and every future update), simply tap the store button on the home menu (or purchase Toontastic: School Edition). We can’t wait to see how our toys spark your imaginations and inspire new stories!

From our team at Launchpad Toys to you, our 3 Million playful storytellers around the world, we wish you all a fantastic Valentine’s Day chock full of… well… chocolate!

We’re excited to announce a new update to Toontastic today for you to create and send your own animated photo-valentines with our newest Toy Camera Card. It’s FREE with the update. We can’t wait to see all the valentines you Romeo and Juliets out there create and share on ToonTube.

Happy Tooning!

– Your Friends at Launchpad Toys

The Dream Mission Plan
Build social studies vocabulary and comprehension with Matt Gomez’s The Dream Mission Plan. Create and share cartoons about equality and the Civil Rights Movement – plus it’s Common Core-aligned!

Export to Camera Roll
Share your own Dream Cartoons with friends and family on YouTube or Google Drive with Export to Camera Roll – brand new for All Access users!

Go “All Access”
Tell stories with Martin Luther King, Jr., draw your own ProtoToys, and Export to Camera Roll with Toontastic: All Access. Download All Access in the App Store or for 50% off through the Volume Purchase Program.

Any questions?
As always, email me at hannah@launchpadtoys.com if you have any ideas or questions about using Toontastic in the classroom!

Common Sense Media is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in a world of media and technology.

Parents: Head over to commonsensemedia.com to read reviews and discover new media to share with your kids.
Teachers: Sign up for Graphite by Common Sense Media to share and discover apps and ideas for digital curricula.

Attn: Teachers! Curious about Toontastic: All Access? We want to get Toontastic: All Access into the hands of as many educators as possible and get kids around the world creating cartoons for class. So, for a limited time only, we’re making Toontastic: All Access “Tweet to Try”.

Tweet about Toontastic using the widget below and we’ll send you a copy of Toontastic: All Access to try out in your classroom – it’s open to all educators, limit one copy per teacher while supplies last.

a Rafflecopter giveaway
What’s Toontastic: All Access?
Glad you asked! Toontastic: All Access is a full-featured version of Toontastic designed for schools that comes unlocked with all current and future characters, backgrounds, and features. Create everything from digital book trailers to animated science reports – then export and share them via ToonTube, YouTube, or iMovie : ) Best of all, it’s 50% off for schools via the Volume Purchase Program.

Learn more about using Toontastic: All Access in the classroom on #LaunchpadEDU, our community of educators using Toontastic in creative and innovative ways.

We’re proud to announce that we’ve teamed up again with our friends at DreamWorks Animation to inspire and empower a new generation of actors, directors, and animators to record, remix, and retell movies in their own voice.

12 Classic Scenes
Pick a beginning, middle, and ending… then spark your imagination with “story starter” videos. What happens next?

 
 
Action FX
Tap characters onscreen to animate special Kung Fu actions like Tigress’s Flying Kick!

Thank you as always for supporting creative kids around the world!

All Access users can now save cartoons to the iPad Camera Roll and import into iMovie, share to YouTube, store them on a computer… anything you’d like. We can’t wait to see all the wacky mashups you imagine like Star Wars Uncut!

Q: What’s “All Access”?
A: Good question! Toontastic has 50+ playsets full of characters, settings, and features like the Toy Camera, ProtoToys, and Special FX. You can purchase playsets individually, or unlock everything (future sets too) with the All Access Pass in-app purchase, or with Toontastic: All Access.

Thank you for continuing to inspire us with your AMAZING stories – your cartoons make every morning here at LPT Galactic Headquarters feel like Saturday Morning!

Thanks to you, educators around the world are using #LaunchpadEDU to find and share ideas for using Toontastic in the classroom! To help spread the word even further, we’re working with more EdTech friends to share Toontastic around the web. Here are a few new lesson ideas for using Toontastic this November:

Grate(ful) Bios on Blendspace
Celebrate Thanksgiving by creating Grate(ful) Biographies on Toontastic. Check out the activity on Blendspace, an online tool for teachers to create and deliver lessons in five minutes to flip classrooms, implement project-based learning, and differentiate instruction.

Story Arc App Flow on Graphite
Looking to dive deeper into the Story Arc? Check out our Story Arc App Flow on Graphite, a free online resource from Common Sense Media for educators to discover, use, and share the best apps, games, websites, and digital curricula.

Where do YOU find inspiration?
We’re always looking for new ways to reach out to and support educators using Toontastic. Help us know where to go next by taking this quick survey so that we can better support your practice in the classroom!

Any questions?
As always, email me at hannah@launchpadtoys.com if you have any ideas or questions about Toontastic for education!

Do you love action figures as much as we do? Well now we’ve brought that fun to Toontastic!

Stage your own high-flying, deep-sea-diving, wave-crashing rescues – no safety wavers necessary. And if you’re lucky enough to have the new iPad Air, get ready for your closeup with panning and zooming settings.

Save the day – today!

Update Toontastic to help Fin Diesel save Billy Flop, rescue rock climbers with Ali McClaw, then come back home to Rescue Rig. Get 11 new toys, 3 new settings, and dozens of 9-1-1s with the RescueTek bundle for $4.99. RescueTek unlocks automatically for “All Access” users.

Thank you for your family’s continued support of playful storytelling. We’re excited to see your awesome rescue tales on ToonTube!

INTERESTED? Great! Here are the steps:

1. Make sure you’re signed into ToonTube. If you don’t have an account, create one today!
2. Purchase the All Access Pass online or in-app. “Toons for Teachers” runs today through Nov. 3rd.
3. Click the button below to share your ToonTube account info and the name and email of your favorite teacher.

From there, we’ll send that teacher a free copy of Toontastic: All Access along with a couple of lesson plans and resources from #LaunchpadEDU, our community for educators to share best practices for digital storytelling.
Thank you as always for your support of playful storytellers AND EDUCATORS around the world! Please email us at educators@launchpadtoys.com if you have any questions. Happy Tooning!

Update 10/31:  We’re thrilled to announce that “Screepy” is our winning Monster! “The tail is for showing off. The feather makes you think he’s on fire. The sharp teeth will make you scream. His black tummy makes him turn into a shadow and one of his arms is made of metal. Be scared or just laugh! “

A giant THANKS! to all the playful storytellers, parents, and teachers who helped make Monsters this Halloween

This contest is being sponsored by our friends at The iMums, who provide kids app reviews by mothers and iDevice lovers. After you enter the contest, head over to their site to read what they think of Toontastic!

We’ve teamed up with The iMums for a week of inventor magic, mayhem, and Monster Making! Enter our Toontastic Monster Maker Contest for a chance to bring your own Monster to life as a plush toy : )

1. Invent and animate your own Monster using ProtoToys! Is it a fire breathing rocket-dragon? An 8-armed Octo-cat? Some kind of Shark-tornado hybrid, perhaps ; ) Get more tips from our Monster Maker Toytivity.
2. Describe your monster in your cartoon. What’s its name? Where’s it from? And why on earth does it have eight arms‽
3. Upload your cartoon to ToonTube and click “Submit” on your cartoon page to add it to the contest. Don’t forget to vote : )
4. PARENTS: Share your kids’ cartoons via email, Facebook, and Twitter. Every Like, Comment, and Tweet counts as a vote.

We’re excited to see all the marvelous Monsters you invent and bring to life with ProtoToys – available for $4.99 in Toontastic or FREE for “All Access” users.

The contest runs today through Oct. 30th. On Halloween, we’ll announce the winning Monster on The iMums and send the winner a plush toy of his or her Monster (see Mr. Jinx above). Happy Spooking! Err.. Tooning!

Still have questions? Check out the Official Contest Rules or email us at educators@launchpadtoys.com – we’re happy to chat! And don’t forget that Toontastic: All Access at half off for schools through Apple’s Volume Purchase Program!

This article was written by Leah LaCrosse, one of our Launchpad Leaders, and originally appeared on her blog Conversations: Learning and Growing on September 25th, 2013. We were so excited after reading it that we wanted to share it with everyone. Hope it inspires you just as much as it did us!

I know that I have posted before about the merits of the Toontastic App in all different content areas, but I have to share this really, really cool experience.

First, watch this student video (above)…

You might not notice anything about the video right away. It looks like a video done by a child showing their understanding of the life cycle of rats. But, wait…there is more.

The author of this video, (we will call her Jane) is a new student to my school. She is very shy and withdrawn. I have not observed much interaction between her and other students. When the options for creating cartoons came up, Jane asked if she could work independently. While I was cringing on the inside because I wanted to see her mingle, I didn’t push the issue. I said, “Absolutely. I cannot wait to see what science you share!” Jane asked if she could share about the life cycle of her pet rats. Our class is studying our Butterfly Garden, cicadas, fresh water jellyfish, and anything that catches our interest in the life sciences. So, “Go for it!”

So, Jane began her prewriting for her Toontastic video. It seemed to be an excruciating process. The attention to detail in the drawings. The time spent mapping out the dialogue. Two class periods (40 minutes each), and Jane didn’t even have her pre-writing page done. Yikes! This is where the panic (in me) starts to come in. I asked Jane if there was anyway that I could help her…could she speed it up…when was she expecting to finish? After a third day of pre-writing, when everyone else is busy building cartoons, Jane asked me if she could finish the pre-writing for homework. While I was a little nervous about sending home the paper, I agreed to the work going home. “Please, please, please, bring it back though! You cannot start over again.”

Jane finished her pre-write at home and the next day began the next part of her project…actually building the cartoon. As you can probably imagine, this was another very long process. Jane’s classmates were beginning to share their work with the class, and she had yet to finish a single scene. I offered Jane any available time I could…recess, studyhall, lunch. Whatever time she could give, I was up for it! I just had to see this cartoon finished.

Today, at the very end of studyhall, Jane brought her iPad up with her pre-writing sheet. This was our conversation…

Me- I am so excited to watch this!
Jane- This is my best work.

We watched the video!
As it finished, I was clapping my hands, grinning from ear to ear, and saying…
“Wow, wow, wow! This is amazing!”

My study hall students started crowing around our computer station asking for Jane to play the cartoon again. She did, and the kids were wild with excitement.

“Wait…you have pet rats? Awesome!”
“How did you draw this so good? You are like REALLY good.”
“Did you look this stuff up, or did you know it?”

Some students were giving Jane knuckles and high fives.
This…for the new girl. The girl that hasn’t spoken but a couple words in class.
Seriously! Moment! Wow!

When the student asked Jane about looking up this “stuff”, I absolutely loved her answer. “No. I didn’t need to look it up. The science was right in front of me. I just waited and watched.”

Time. Detail. Patience. And, an amazing tool to help bring out the shy, new girl to our school. Toontastic…storytelling. This app just opened the door for creativity, science, and connections.

Would this moment had happened without the combination and series of events? Can I have this type of sharing and learning and growth with another tool in the classroom? I’m sure you can guess my answer. Thank you Launchpad Toys!

From Monsters to Monster Trucks, draw hundreds of new animated inventions with ProtoToys, Toontastic’s newest feature. Bring your stories and imagination to life with rocket boosters, helicopter blades, and flying capes because you can now design animated characters and vehicles in Toontastic!
Update Toontastic to try “ProtoPaws” for free and create your own prancing ponies, dogs, unicorns, elephants… well, you get the idea : ) The rest of the ProtoToys playset can be purchased for $4.99 or unlocks automatically for “All Access” users.

NOTE: All Access users should tap the Settings gear on the home menu and tap “Restore” to unlock the new playsets.

Thank you so much for your family’s support and remarkable imagination. We can’t wait to see your inventions on ToonTube!

PARENTS & TEACHERS: Here are 6 easy steps to upgrade your account.

1. Open or create a new cartoon
2. Check “Share to ToonTube”
3. Tap “Update Account”
4. Confirm your Account Info
5. Record a quick Approval Video
6. Check your email

Thank you for your help in keeping ToonTube safe and fun for kids of all ages. Don’t worry, your Approval Videos will never be made public.

With this new system, we can be sure that every video is ‘Adult Approved’ while helping parents and teachers to connect with kids through digital storytelling.

Questions? Please email us at support@launchpadtoys.com.

Happy Tooning!

 
Procreate by Savage Interactive ($4.99)
Use Procreate to create a scientific drawing of your favorite animal, plant, science phenomenon, etc. Then, import your drawing as a background into Toontastic using the toy•camera and explain it.

InfiniScroll by Curious Hat ($1.99)
Working with a small group, play an exquisite corpse-inspired game by individually recording parts of a story. Make sure only the person directly before and directly after you hear your part of the story!

Minecraft Pocket Ed. by Mojang ($6.99)
Who are we kidding – it’s Minecraft and we’re addicted. Learn more about teaching with Minecraft on MinecraftEdu.com, then create your own “How Toon” in Toontastic for Toon Academy: Minecraft.

MadPad HD by Smule ($2.99)
Practice sequencing by recording each sentence or plot point from a story, then mashup your story set by playing the clips in different orders. Post your new story mashup to YouTube, or animate it in Toontastic.

Uzu by Colordodge Labs ($1.99)
Build teamwork skill by working with a partner to create a pattern of movement. For an added challenge, try creating patterns for your partner to recreate.

Isle of Tune by Happylander ($1.99)
Build your own musical journey in Isle of Tune. Share your musical island online, then play it as background music in a new cartoon you create in Toontastic.

Doodlecast Pro by  zinc Roe ($3.99)
Make interactive doodle stories to share with friends and family. Create an animation that explains how to draw your favorite character, how to solve a hard math problem, or just why your family should get a dog.

iMovie by Apple ($4.99)
Itching to make live action movies? Use iMovie to edit your own Sundance-winning films – after you’ve drafted their story plots using Toontastic, that is!

Scribble Press by Scribble Press ($3.99)
We think animation is great, but sometimes making a good, old-fashioned picture book is just a better option. Try turing your favorite chapter book into a short picture book – I bet it’ll be harder than you anticipate.

Toca Tailor by Toca Boca ($2.99)
This one’s just fun. Design a character in Toca Tailor – it can be your own or a favorite from a book you’ve read recently. Then, use Toontastic to animate a story about the character you created.

The following article appeared on the Cooney Center blog on 10/8/13.

Educational psychology has long recognized the impact of informal learning in child development. In fact, most educators and psychologists believe that young students learn more from other kids with shared perspectives and experiences than from adults so far removed from childhood. Whether at home, on the playground, or in the classroom, students assimilate, construct, and in-turn teach and reflect on new knowledge better in informal peer communities than more traditional “instructivist” settings.

So wouldn’t it be amazing if we could build a community for kids to swap stories and teach each other about the world around us?

Well… yes! Today, our team at Launchpad Toys is excited to announce an exciting new partnership with the teachers of MinecraftEdu and share what we believe to be a powerful model for educators and developers to co-construct social learning spaces – both inside and outside the classroom.

We call our project “Toon Academy: Minecraft”. It’s like Khan Academy, but “for kids, by kids” to create “How Toons” teaching each other tips and tricks they’ve learned in Minecraft. Our goals are three-fold:

1. Engage kids in self-reflection about what they’re learning through play. Minecraft is a remarkably open-ended tool that teachers are using to explore a broad array of curricula from Physics to Free-Market Economics. As they prep their “How Toons”, our kid-creators hone their understandings as much as they would through a science report or a five-paragraph-essay, but in a way that’s both accessible and shareable.
2. Foster strong presentation skills. Throughout the app and the accompanying materials (a “Mission Plan” for the classroom and a “Toytivity” for home), we walk kids through our own tips and tricks for blending a strong presentation with a good story. From boardroom slide decks to Kickstarter videos, presentation skills are paramount in today’s creative workforce – and a great story is the foundation of a great presentation.
3. Curate a vast library of kid-created “How Toons” freely accessible to the world.

   For the next 10 days, we’re hosting a contest to find the best Minecraft lessons on ToonTube. The contest is open to every Toontastic creator (download Toontastic: FREE or Toontastic: All Access) and the cartoons created can be watched online by anyone in the world.

This sounds great, but how is it relevant to the larger EdTech community?

As excited as we are about Toon Academy: Minecraft (and let’s be honest, cartoons + Minecraft = bees knees + cats pajamas), the true promise lies in its model for interdisciplinary collaboration between developers, educators, and kids. Start with a topic that students are passionate about (Minecraft), throw in a constructionist learning environment that empowers them to create and share content (Toontastic), and mix in a community of educators (MinecraftEdu) to provide teaching resources (lesson plans) and scaffold open and constructive discourse.

For years, too many developers and educators have overlooked the remarkable potential of informal learning communities beyond the classroom and outside of the (software) box. With the tools afforded us today, we finally have the opportunity to collaboratively create new learning spaces “for kids, by kids” – communities where kids can share, reflect, and teach each other about the world around us.

We hope all you developers and educators out there will join us in creating social learning communities like Toon Academy: Minecraft. In the meantime, we’ll happily settle for a few tips on avoiding creepers.

Update 10/18:  With over 700 votes, we’re thrilled to announce that “What I Love About MINECRAFT” is our winning How Toon! “I like creative because you have infinite lives and infinite resources. An infinite number. You heard it – infinite!” We couldn’t agree more, GoldenNinja.

A giant THANKS! to all the playful storytellers, parents, and teachers who helped make How Toons an awesome success! Thanks to you, next time you need to figure something out in Minecraft, you can go straight to ToonTube and learn it from other kids!

1. Create a Minecraft “How Toon” on Toontastic that teaches other kids your favorite Minecraft activity.
2. Upload your cartoon to ToonTube and submit it to the contest between October 7th and October 17th, 2013.
3. Share you How Toons with friends and family on Facebook and Twitter – each like, share, comment and tweet counts as a vote for your cartoon!

At the end of the contest, the cartoon with the most votes will win a “How Toons” Prize Package from Launchpad Toys and MinecraftEdu. We’ve even created a Common Core-aligned Mission Plan and a Launchpad Toytivity to help teachers and parents work with kids to create their How Toons teaching others their favorite Minecraft activities.

So roll up those sleeves and get ready to make some great Minecraft tutorials! For more resources on teaching with Minecraft, check out MinecraftEdu, a collaborative resource created by a small team of educators and programmers working to make Minecraft affordable and accessible to schools everywhere.

Still have questions? Check out the Official Contest Rules or email us at educators@launchpadtoys.com – we’re happy to chat! And don’t forget to grab Toontastic: All Access at half off through Apple’s Volume Purchase Program for schools!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Empower kids to tell their stories through play this school year. Refer friends and help us spread the word about the power of play, storytelling, and Saturday Morning Cartoons every day. Oh yeah –  it’ll help you get a better chance to win, too! We can’t wait to see what your students create this year with Toontastic.

Have a blog? We’d love for you to share the giveaway with your readers on YOUR site. Send me an email at hannah@launchpadtoys.com, and I’ll help you get up and running with the embedded iFrame!

Call in the stunt doubles, Toontastic now has Special FX!

Today marks a fun milestone for the team here at Launchpad Toys Galactic Headquarters with the release of Toontastic v2.1.0.  For years we’ve pretended to blow our characters up, set fire to our backgrounds, and unleash “acts of god” on our unsuspecting Toons… but starting today we can do it for real! ANIMATED WITH SOUND EFFECTS!

With the new Toontastic Special FX pack, you can now create your own Hollywood Blockbusters chock full of lightning strikes, fires, explosions, falling anvils, rain, snow, tornadoes and… well, you get the picture.

What are you waiting for? Download the update! Oh, and you can purchase the Special FX pack in the Toontastic Toy Store or unlock it along with every other character, setting, and tool inside the app with the All Access Pass (or Toontastic: All Access in the App Store).

Happy Tooning you crazy Movie Makers!

-Your Friends at Launchpad Toys

With everything we’ve learned in the last few years, we wanted to share our experiences and best practices with other educators, so we developed a free Storytelling Workshop Kit with everything you need to throw your own 90-minute Toontastic Storytelling Workshop Here’s what’s included:

– Detailed instructions for a 90-minute workshop
– Printables and supporting resources
– Materials to advertise your workshop

Sounds easy, right? Just download the Workshop Kit, grab a few copies of Toontastic: All Access, and help kids learn the fundamentals of storytelling by making cartoons!

Have questions? Email me at hannah@launchpadtoys.com and I’ll be happy to help. Happy tooning!