Shaped like a Game Boy but big enough to be its grandpa, the Leapster (for kids ages 4 to 8) system has a roomy color touchscreen, a Palm-type stylus and a single speaker, plus a slot for game cartridges.

The game comes with one cartridge, called Learning with Leap, which has some nice touches. Rabbit River is, appropriately, a "Frogger" rip-off wherein you steer a little rabbit from moving log to moving log until you get safely to the other side of the river. The catch is that each spot on each log has a number or a math sign, so that if you jump from "5" to "+" to " 7," you must end up on "12."

In the Chicken Coop, you test memory by uncovering words and matching them to opposites, for example, or uncovering animals and matching them to the sounds they make. The chickens that cover up the words and pictures are the stars of that game (and proof that South Park doesn't hold the monopoly on funny rudimentary animations).

The Color Corral is also highly amusing. It seems like a digital version of a normal coloring book, until you throw in the animated effects, like falling snow or a backflipping rabbit. It's so fun I only wish I could have saved some of my crazier creations.

The rest of the cartridge is a little more uneven. In Catcher Fields, you catch falling letters in order to spell a word, but the controls are too clumsy. The Shape Shop is where you fill in blueprints or draw freely with various shapes, but it doesn't seem like much of a challenge. Musical Meadow, featuring a creature called Opera Rooster, is just bizarre.

Learning with Leap is just the beginning for this platform. By Christmas, eight titles should be on the market, with names like Math Baseball and Mr. Pencil's Learn to Draw and Write. There will even be appearances by Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob. All of this is great for little kids, though I can't imagine what LeapFrog has in store as a teenage equivalent.