VTech is hoping to tap into one of the last unexplored tablet markets: Infants.

The Hong Kong-based toy maker is targeting its Inno Tab 2 Baby at children from 1 to 9 years of age, expanding beyond the regular Inno Tab’s 4-to-9 year age range.

“The reality is that [the technology’s] there, and babies as young as 12 months just have this natural propensity to want to do whatever their parents are doing,” said Laurie Honza, director of product development of VTech Electronics North America.

Aesthetically, the Inno Tab 2 Baby looks like others in the Inno Tab line. Its thick plastic and protective gel skin are meant to render the tablet indestructible enough for little hands that would just as quickly throw it from a high chair as play with it. The Baby features different onboard content as well, including three baby apps, a Noah’s Ark e-book, and built-in music (six playtime melodies and six sleepy-time melodies).

For older kids, there’s a rotating camera and video recorder, licensed games from Nickelodeon and Disney, an art studio app and an organizer for scheduling soccer practices and visits to grandma’s house.

VTech also provides custom-designed hardware to make the interface easier for tots. Beyond its physical toughness, the Baby comes with two styluses shaped like triangles rather than cylinders, that provide a thicker, more easily graspable shape for tiny fingers.

According to the “Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children,” children are exposed to new technologies long before they ever enter a preschool classroom. But, as VTech targets the youngest tablet demographic ever, how young is too young for children to be introduced to tech?

It’s a hot topic of debate. The National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, for example, released a joint statement last year discouraging parents from exposing children younger than 2 years old to screens.

However, Honza insists that interactivity is key, pointing to the Baby’s visual stimulation and how intrigued toddlers are by tapping the screen and watching what happens.

“If you hand over an iPad to a little one, you’ll see how easily engaged they are,” she said.

But it depends on how engaged.

“There is some research that looks at if you have mom, baby and media and there’s conversation and pointing and talking and labeling then that can actually lead to some learning,” said Brigid Barron, an associate professor in the School of Education at Stanford University, who specializes in the relationship between kids and technology. “Just sitting your 12-month-old down in front of media alone does not seem to lead to any learning.”

I conducted some very unscientific testing myself, plopping an Inno Tab 2 Baby in front of my various little cousins, aged 22 months to 9 years old. Most of them are pretty tech-savvy for their age. Edward, who is 7 years old, figured out how to unlock my Android phone within two minutes and navigate to the menu. Brooke, at 9 years old, has an iPod touch and regularly emails and FaceTimes with the other girls on her soccer team.

The results? Older kids like Edward and Brooke activated and navigated the Inno Tab with aplomb, if becoming a little bored quickly. Charlotte and Amanda are both 3 years old, but the former spends much more time playing with her parents’ smartphones. That showed — she’s also an Angry Birds whiz — since Charlotte had no problem playing with the Inno Tab. Amanda, on the other hand, passed most of her time using the stylus to madly scribble across the screen, without any particular objective.

Brandon, my youngest cousin, at 22 months, stared at the thick plastic contraption with the cluelessness of someone still trying to master the toilet. He seldom made it past the welcome screen, as he only focused on the Inno Tab’s physical buttons rather than its screen. That meant he hit the power button as soon as we would turn it on.

“I think he failed the test,” laughed Michael, his father.

With the older kids, the Inno Tab played over as well and intuitively as any educational tablet like the LeapPad. However, though younger kids such Brandon and Amanda fell within the right age range, it’s clear that outside guidance was necessary for them to figure out what the Inno Tab even did, emphasizing the need for parents to be present with their children as they play with the tablets.

“Parents just have to use a sort of common sense approach and look carefully and watch,” Barron said. “It’s most powerful if children can be playing with parents or peers so that they’re not just playing alone.”

Krishna Vedati doesn’t want your children to just watch Saturday morning cartoons. He wants them to make their own.

Vedati is the CEO of Tynker, a “learn to code” platform for kids in third through eighth grade, one of many that have popped up in recent years aimed at parents who think computing skills are critical for their children.

But rather than focus on computer languages like HTML, the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup teaches kids how to think like a programmer, he said.

“The way I think about programming is just like any other language the kids are learning today,” Vedati said. “This is just like another language, just a different set of life skills than if you learned French or Spanish.”

Consumers might want what Vedati’s offering, in the waike of results from a pilot of Tynker in Bay Area schools over the past year. The startup, which has raised $3.5 million in angel funding, was inundated with 10,000 new requests after opening up to educators nationwide earlier this month, the majority from parents eager to get their hands on a home version of the coding platform.

Vedati estimates that a home-based edition should be ready in the next couple months. However, for now, Tynker is only available to schools. The platform is free for educators, with an option to pay and upgrade to premium.

Vedati’s own son went to a coding camp at Stanford University and, two weeks later, was able to build a Flash player game. Still, Vedati noticed that he had merely learned how to regurgitate the pre-scripted instructions for building the game, without any understanding of programming’s fundamentals.

It got Vedati thinking. How could he and the rest of the Tynker team design a platform that could convey the conceptual logic behind programming to kids in a structured and, more importantly, fun manner? It was the ideal project for Vedati, an engineer turned entrepreneur. He has been coding since his university years in India, where his love of video games drew him to the field.

“[Kids are] exposed to so much technology,” he said. “But school hasn’t changed in 50 years, so we thought these kids need a different set of skills for their generation to use the technology to their advantage.”

With Tynker, kids are introduced to coding through a simple, visual platform that allows its young users to create games and basic animations with nary a line of code in sight. Its drag-and-drop design is similar to Scratch, another kid-friendly coding language conceived at MIT. One of Tynker’s simplest concepts is animating a character and teaching it how to walk and talk.

“By the time they’re done training the character, they’ve probably learned 20 primitives,” said Vedati. “Once they get the knowledge of 20 primitives, then they’re asking what else can I do?”

In general, Vedati says girls focus on storytelling and characters, while boys gravitate towards designing games. And, in general, the coding projects grow more complex as the children get older. Whereas third graders are happy to make anything they can show their parents, eighth graders want to build multilevel games.

Later down the line, Vedati said, he aims to extend Tynker’s reach to high schoolers in a manner that would transition students to a regular programming language, such as JavaScript or Python, and he hopes Tynker will help fix the lack of coding courses at schools nationwide.

“Programming is very near and dear to me,” Vedati said. “I firmly believe that it’s a life skill that anyone can learn and they could put it to use no matter what their interests are, whether their interests are history, art — there’s computation going on in every field.”

Sixteen tables line the sides of the showcase at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Grinning merchants man each one, enticing customers with their wares. For these startups, it’s their chance to make that major sale and perhaps win the support of a venture capitalist.

One vendor happily completes a transaction with the flourish of a fuzzy, flower pen. Another group advertises their deluxe options — laptop stickers that range from “I <3 Justin Bieber” to “One Directioner.”

If this sounds a bit junior high to you, you’d be right: All the companies have been started and run by seventh grade girls.

Welcome to Entrepreneurial Night for the Girls Middle School, a progressive intermediate school in Palo Alto, Calif. Founded by tech entrepreneur Kathleen Bennett in 1998, the school’s goal is to foster girls’ curiosity in typically male-centric areas — namely, entrepreneurship and science, technology, engineering and mathematics education.

“Middle school is the time when [girls] stop identifying as liking those subjects or being good at those subjects,” said Dan Glass, GMS’ director of communications.

Parents agree. “Boys tend to hog the mic in classrooms, especially on those types of topics and especially in Silicon Valley where their fathers are all engineers,” said Brad Williams, a GMS parent whose daughter, Caroline, currently attends the 6th grade. “The idea was that girls in a girls-only environment have an unobstructed path to choosing science, technology, engineering, math if they’re interested without it being selected away from them by a bunch of boys who are more assertive.”

GMS curriculum is Silicon Valley to the core. Students follow a six-day course rotation that cycles through a regular five-day week to make room for unconventional requirements, including computer science and entrepreneurial studies.

The mandatory entrepreneurial program is one of the school’s centerpieces, with 150 companies started since the program’s inception. Recruitment starts in sixth grade and is focused on building teamwork, as the girls are thrown together on various camping trips and other bonding activities. They work together at open tables.

After observing the students’ work habits throughout the year, they are then grouped together to begin writing their business proposals and learning the importance of teamwork.

Like actual entrepreneurs, the girls learn basic accounting, write up a business plan and go through a prototyping process with focus groups, with their goods targeted at other middle school girls.

And, if groups pitch similar business plans, they must diversify. For example, Snuggle Up creates custom pillows and blankets, while Pillow Pockets makes animal pillows with, as the name suggests, a pocket in the back to hold small items.

Though they receive plenty of support and mentorship along the way, students are ultimately required to run the business on their own, with no outsourcing to parents allowed unless they’re willing to be hired at the standard $2 per hour rate. Each girl receives a designated title as the vice president of communications, finance, marketing or manufacturing.

Each startup is expected to develop a product and sell enough to pay back the school’s initial loan — usually between $100 and $200 — as well as donate some profits to charity. Leftover materials are liquidated at the end of the year.

“You walk into a seventh grade classroom and you’d see one group of girls with scissors and sewing machines,” Glass said. “And one group of girls is working on printing on water bottles.”

Whether or not GMS actually inspires the next generation of female entrepreneurs remains to be seen. The school is only 15 years old, which means its oldest alumni haven’t even exited their 20s yet. But, according to Glass, a number have gone the entrepreneurial route, including one who started a jewelry-making business.

GMS holds an Entrepreneurial Night as a culmination of the girls’ achievements. By the time the event rolls around in late January, most, if not all, startups have more than repaid the school’s initial loan. Here, they have a chance to make their grand pitch in front of a panel of real-life venture capitalists, along with an audience of more than a hundred people.

“They learn that communication is most essential when you have to present to investors and present to your parents,” humanities teacher Amoy Walker said, with the girls learning self-presentation skills including inflection, body language and eye contact.

For parents who feared their daughters would lose their voices to outspoken boys, it was clear at Entrepreneurial Night that those voices were definitely present, loud and strong.

Of course, there were still nerves. As the young entrepreneurs filed into Hahn Auditorium, some closed their eyes and did breathing exercises. GMS parent and entrepreneurial coach Roberta Friedman cheered on her charges.

“You’ll be fine! You guys know what you’re doing!,” she reassured them.

The presentations covered the basics of the product, the girls’ journey from conception to execution, competition and a proposal to the VCs for a $100 loan with the promise of full repayment, plus three percent of their total profit. Some girls spoke clearly and confidently, while others were visibly nervous and stumbled. However, overall, the girls exuded professionalism with a healthy dose of endearing, preadolescent charm.

One Pillow Pockets VP assessed her products’ main competition — Pillow Pets.

“They’re a pillow and a pet,” she declared. “But we’re a pillow, a pet and a pocket!”

Another startup, CTRL + ALT + DEL explained the story behind its name. The girls recycle old keyboard keys and remote control buttons to make jewelry and key chains.

“Somebody asked for a CTRL + ALT + DEL pin to wear during meetings but we had no idea what that meant because we all have Macs,” the girl stated matter-of-factly. However, they liked the name so much, they adopted it.

In the end, each VC invests in two startups — with everyone receiving funding. So not exactly the ending for every Silicon Valley startup, but it’s certainly a nice beginning.

With three out of four of the best-selling digital toys of the last year, LeapFrog is expected by Wall Street to announce solid fourth-quarter returns today, buoyed by robust holiday sales. Analysts are looking for the Emeryville, Calif., educational toy company to earn 49 cents a share on revenue of $223 million in the period.

Strong Q4 earnings are typical, since LeapFrog usually has strong seasonal sales. This year, its LeapPad 2 sold out on Amazon, Target, Toys “R” Us and Walmart at the full $99 price.

The performance is a small beacon of light in the overall flagging state of the toy sector, which is quickly shifting to digital products, such as the tablets that LeapFrog makes.

With an increasingly tech-savvy generation of children to satisfy, LeapFrog is in a comfortable position to focus on considerable expansion in 2013, particularly internationally. It recently inked deals with Viacom International Media Networks to expand its Nickelodeon content to overseas markets in the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

LeapFrog will have to invest in substantial R&D in 2013, and it faces more competition, as other kid-centric tablets have flooded the market recently.

LeapFrog will announce its fourth-quarter results at 2 pm PT.

The story goes that Goldilocks searched for the perfect bed by breaking into the home of an innocent family of bears.

GoldieBlox, however, will just build a bed by herself.

GoldieBlox is a construction toy designed by Stanford University engineer Debbie Sterling and aimed at young girls. To use it, users read along with Goldie and build the machines the titular inventor builds to solve problems in her line of books.

It’s part of an effort to solve a much bigger problem. According to the National Science Foundation’s 2011 report, women have half as much presence in science and engineering fields as they do in the workforce as a whole. Another NSF study finds that only 4 percent of women enter college with plans to pursue an engineering degree. That figure falls to 0.4 percent for those intending to major in computer sciences.

In her mostly male field, Sterling said, she hopes to inspire a new generation of female engineers with her new girl-centric construction toys.

That’s why Sterling believes it’s crucial to break occupational gender norms — traditionally, girls flock toward the social sciences and humanities, while boys gravitate toward math and sciences. And, although her father was a software engineer, Sterling admits she had no clue what engineering was while she was growing up.

That’s where GoldieBlox comes in. With its pretty pastel coloring and spunky heroine, the toy eschews the notion that engineering is a cold, “manly” field. This may sound sexist to some, but Sterling is simply being realistic about appealing to little girls. In the future, Sterling plans to expand Goldie beyond mechanical engineering to e-books that would teach older girls basic coding.

At Stanford, Sterling initially dreaded her first engineering course, Mechanical Engineering 101, which she enrolled in on her high school math teacher’s suggestion.

“I really thought it was going to be my first F,” said Sterling, who holds a degree in mechanical engineering and product design. “But it was totally creative, building, collaborative and problem solving — all these things I liked.”

After quitting her job as the marketing director of a jewelry company last December, Sterling researched existing construction toys and observed how girls interacted with them.

One aspect stuck out to her in particular:

“I started noticing this thing where the girls weren’t interested in building what was on the front of the box, and would kind of get bored. So I would ask them what’s their favorite toy, and they would run upstairs and bring me back down a book.”

That’s when she realized she needed a way to synthesize little girls’ love of characters and books with the hands-on component of Legos and Erector sets.

Thus was born GoldieBlox, a girl engineer who guides readers through stories about building. But what should they build? Sterling looked up homemade physics and science projects, and settled on a basic belt drive, which became the basis of the first book.

She made the project more enticing by calling it a “spinning machine” that would twirl all the characters in the story, much like her favorite ride at Disneyland, the spinning teacups. Goldie’s spinning machine is comprised of thread spools, ribbons and a peg board.

“As soon as the narrative was introduced, the girls were totally engaged and really wanted to build the machines,” Sterling said. “Not to build the machines, but to spin the friends.”

Sterling received expert mentorship along the way, including from former college adviser David Kelley, the founder of Ideo. When Sterling showed Kelley her work, he immediately connected her with Brendan Boyle, a fellow partner at Ideo and head of its toy department.

“What I like about [GoldieBlox] is, No. 1, the company has purpose; and, No. 2, it has a strong point of view,” Boyle said.

Sterling hopes to expand the GoldieBlox brand over time by developing Goldie’s friends and adding to the complexity of their engineering tasks. In book two, Goldie builds a parade float; in three, a pulley elevator. She believes the strength of the brand lies in her strong protagonist.

“The most important [thing] is that she is an engineer role model,” she said. “With the other girly toys, they have beauticians, nurses and stuff. Those are all the typical role model characters that everybody’s already seen. Goldie’s an engineer, a tinkerer — you know she’s a maker and she’s cool.”

The first teaser for the marvelous-looking documentary “Landfill Harmonic” is making the rounds online. It centers on a “recycled orchestra” in Cateura, Paraguay, that uses instruments fashioned by impoverished slum residents.

Check out their heartwarming story in this trailer:

Campaigns are serious tests of your creativity and foresight. They are unpredictable, agile, and short — an 18 month, $1 billion, essentially disposable organization. Hackers can thrive in an environment like that, to a point where I’m not sure anyone else really can. Everything is over far too quickly to get boring.

– Scott VanDenPlas, lead DevOps for Obama, in an email to Ars Technica about the relative IT efficiencies of the Obama and Romney campaigns

Silicon Valley is really quite a boring place. The story of start-ups should be a documentary on PBS, not a weekly reality show on Bravo.

– Nick Bilton on “Start-Ups”