ToonTastic, Jr

Title: ToonTastic, Jr.!

Bibliographic information:

Creator: Launchpad Toys

• First Published: November, 2012
• Language: English

Reader's Annotation:  Have you ever wanted to make your own cartoon?  Toontastic Jr. will help young children through the process, from creating your own plot, characters, setting - even adding dialogue and music.  

Interest Level: Ages 4-9+

Awards, if applicable: N/A

Play summary: When you first launch ToonTastic, a jaunty pirate shanty plays and the child is invited to select three scenes from three spinning wheels.  When the child taps the screen, the wheel will stop, and a narrator will announce what choice they have made.  They can then either select their next scene, or change their decision on the first.  After three scenes are selected, they can then begin to tell their story.  The user watches a 30 second cartoon with between 2 and 4 characters, and some set items which can move.  Then, the narrator asks, “What happens next?”  What happens next is the user has the opportunity to record their voice and move the characters around the screen.  After they have finished with that, they select the mood and subsequent music of the scene.  After they have repeated that process for their next two scenes, they can title their animation and play it through.

Critical review:

This is an impressive creative app, which is very functional even for a pre-literate audience.  The combination of visual clues and narration makes it easy to follow, and the preloaded worlds and figures makes it so that each user can create something the first time around.  Additional usage just results in a slightly more sophisticated product.  And for the user who has stretched the boundaries of what they can do with this app - they can graduate into ToonTastic which allows more flexibility.  

Why include it?

Making projects and apps are highly dynamic ways to get kids to experiment and play and learn new things.  This allows them to learn about the elements of a story, to create something which will impress their families and have fun.  It would also be great for library programming - for example, creating a summer reading program