It's available for online pre-sale on July 17 and on store shelves in early August.Co/2NVfnLmPRESAVE HERE: Recommendations for fanfics in which have events and plotlines relating to the manga that has not yet occurred in the anime should have Spoiler Tags marked appropriately. The LeapPad Ultra will be sold for $149.99. "Children who are having problems learning have been ostracized by the whole class who suddenly discovered the tag pen that helped them learn to read.and suddenly they became a lot more confident in school, and they became a lot more accepted and suddenly they were part of the class again." "I get loads and loads of letters, emails, Facebook posts, on how our products have literally saved children’s lives," Barbour says. Instead, he says, it's all about kids taking their learning experience from home back into the classroom. We can put education into our product today that will not go into textbooks for probably five or six years." "We can move a lot faster we can move a lot nimbler. "Getting a product into the education system is very complex," Barbour points out. However, one place you won't see LeapFrog is your kid's classroom. "We see a massive opportunity to deliver this educational entertainment experience in Asia, South America and parts of Europe." Right now LeapFrog focuses mainly on English-speaking countries, but Barbour sees growth internationally too. "We’re still gonna have the same mission, but the difference is we’ll have an expanded will be teaching kids health, it will be teaching kids hand-eye coordination." "If you look at us in five years or ten years, we’re kinda gonna look the same," he says. LeapFrog has over a thousand products in their stable, and Barbour still sees plenty of opportunity for growth. If you look at the toy industry, awards for top educational toy of the year, we’ve won it eight of 13 years." "We’ve won more awards than anyone else in this space," Barbour points out. And they’ve been raking in awards for years. LeapFrog shares were up 53% in 2012, thanks in part to the Ultra’s predecessor, the LeapPad 2. "We want to see if they’re understanding the instructions, whether they are able to navigate through the screens, or play with the toy and access all the buttons," says Jody Sherman LeVos, PhD, the leader of LeapFrog's learning team.Īll the research has led to success for the company and its bottom line. Everything that you can find on this tablet is appropriate for ages four to nine." They did so by creating an ever-growing list of LeapFrog-approved websites and built their web experience to allow access only to the sites on that list.Īs with all their products, LeapFrog tested the new LeapPad Ultra at their Emeryville, California "kid lab." Jill Waller, LeapFrog's vice president of multimedia learning, explained that she and her team "filtered out anything that’s inappropriate for kids. The company has figured out a way to keep kids connected - without exposing them to the more unseemly parts of the web. This is the first LeapPad tablet with Internet capabilities, and LeapFrog made sure they did it right. "We’re really the only kind of broad-based entertainment company for children that has this life-changing educational aspect built in." "The LeapPad Ultra is today’s best tablet for kids that delivers what the others do and more," says Barbour.