LeapFrog: Math Adventure to the Moon is one of those programs that tries to mix education and entertainment. Unfortunately, it fails to do either. In fact, its attempts at one almost completely undermine the other, with educational elements bolted awkwardly onto the story while the story only interferes with any educational aspect. It boils down to little more than an extended commercial for the LeapFrog educational system, but I can’t say that this DVD is a terribly good advertisement for them if it is representative of its educational methods.
Tad and Lily are two frog siblings who are assigned to bring 10 objects into school for show-and-tell. Their first obstacle is that neither seems capable of counting to 10, but luckily, they have their friend Edison the Firefly to help them out with that. Before long and without much rationale, the trio are strapped into a rocket aimed at the moon, but their boisterous fun sends them wildly off course and directly in the path of a nasty looking space storm. The pair must then learn and use new math (or math-like) skills in order to save themselves and the cuddly little alien friends they meet while collecting a sufficient number of space rocks for their school show-and-tell.
My first and biggest problem with this DVD is that for a self-proclaimed “Math Adventure,” it contains precious little actual math, opting instead for counting exercises, pattern recognition, and rudimentary set theory. Something is deeply wrong from an educational standpoint when a DVD meant to teach math has run through 70% of its running time before it gets to its one and only actual math problem (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate how long it takes math to appear if the running time is 36 minutes). The skills emphasized are building blocks for good math skills and a label on the front of the DVD even lists the skills being taught by the DVD, but it still feels like false advertising to label this as a math teaching tool. The DVD is also labeled for use by 3-6 year olds, which means the label is either far too broad or this DVD is much too simple for the upper end of its target audience. It’s been quite some time, but I’m pretty sure I was doing far more math than what’s presented on this DVD by first grade. To be frank, this DVD feels like the kind of “new math” hokum that simplifies topics of the curriculum and lowers standards so that teachers and students alike don’t have to feel bad because they’re both failing miserably at instructing or comprehending simple, fundamental math skills. If this is the best teaching tool we can come up with, then we deserve to be getting our asses kicked by the Indians and Chinese in elementary school math as we fritter away the fundamentals for future competitiveness in the name of improved self-esteem.
Part of the reason why there is so little math in the DVD is also because anything instructional has to be interrupted to push the plot (such as it is) forward. The counting games and sorting exercises are also just jammed into the storyline, ensuring that any momentum the story builds up is interrupted for another “math” lesson. As a result, the educational goals of Math Adventure to the Moon are in almost direct conflict with its entertainment goals, and vice versa, so it can’t do either very well. In contrast, something like PBS’s CyberChase integrates its math problems into the plot far more smoothly (in addition to actually teaching math, although at a much higher level than where LeapFrog is apparently aiming this DVD). It’s also adding insult to injury, but the characters also do a whole lot of stupid things that even the children watching should pick up on. For instance, if space blocks of the same color stick together, then won’t sorting all your space blocks by color into giant piles just result in massive, unusuable mountains of stuck-together space blocks?
There’s not much to this DVD. It is presented in anamorphic widescreen with a 2.0 Dolby stereo soundtrack. Both are perfectly adequate, as is the animation in general. Special features include a sorting game, a few sing-along songs, and a clip from LeapFrog’s Let’s Go to School DVD teaching the alphabet. The last bit is the DVD’s only saving grace, since LeapFrog’s language instruction seems far, far better than their math instruction.
Since there is so little math in LeapFrog: Math Adventure to the Moon, I can only offer an equation of my own to conclude: 2 frogs + 1 DVD + 0 math = a losing proposition any way you add it up.
