BBC RaW

Engaging entertainment led literacy activities for adult learners.

The BBC launched its Reading and Writing campaign back in 2005 and Milo have been involved from the start. The aim of the campaign is to encourage adults with literacy problems back into education via an engaging selection of reading and writing activities.

RaW Family Literacy

Milo developed a suite of interactive Flash driven storytelling activities for their first project, featuring Tony Robinson. ‘Telling Tales’ was split it to three parts allowing the users to learn some great tips for telling stories to their kids. This was a mix of Tony Robinson filmed in a chromat studio working with a series of animated characters to deliver a guide to imagining and telling children’s stories.

The next section gave users the opportunity to create their own visual story with a cleverly designed drag and drop interface that empowered the users to make their own story environment with animated characters and background sounds. Finally they were able to submit their story to an online storybook where their friends could go back and look at their creation.

The next activity moved on to story reading. Gail Porter appeared alongside a collection of animated characters designed specially for the RaW campaign. The stars of ‘Max and Lara’s Amazing Space Circus’ assisted Gail with demonstrating some simple story reading techniques that aimed to make reading short stories to children a more pleasurable experience. All of the characters appeared in an exclusive downloadable storybook and audiobook that was made available once all of the modules had been completed.

Having covered story telling and story reading the final activity in the series was story writing featuring Lenny Henry. This activity took the users through a process of writing a story within a supported framework. The whole process is ably assisted by the voice and characterization of Lenny Henry.

Users were able to choose locations, characters and scenarios for their stories and were then prompted to add their own ideas to the story. As with the first activity the users had the opportunity to add their story to a growing collection of user generated content.

Throughout these projects Milo, ably assisted by scriptwriter Darren Kisner, worked collaboratively with the BBC’s production team to deliver these effective and popular activities. The feedback from RaW users across this set of activities was overwhelmingly positive.

As well as these core-learning activities Milo built a series of RaW Readers to accompany World Book Day from 2006 to 2008. The reader opened to show a book-shelf that featured the ‘Quick Reads’ from that year.

‘Quick Reads’ were a collection if specially written books by well known authors targeted at people with low literacy skills. The reader gave them the opportunity to preview the first chapter of each book as an interactive page-turner, giving them the experience of reading a book and turning the pages online.

Each book was accompanied by a recording of the author, or another well-known voice, reading that chapter. The activity also gave the readers the opportunity to comment on the books for other users to read.

The activity was so successful as part of the Quick Reads campaign on World Book Day that the idea was developed for the second and third year so that the client was able to populate and re-skin the application for further use. The reader was also re-versioned for a selection of children’s books to coincide with Children’s Book Day

Using some other BBC entertainment 'properties' Milo also made popular activities based around Football Match Reporting with Adrian Chiles and Strictly Dance Fever with Graham Norton.