We’re celebrating the launch of our new course Guess What!, by giving you a glimpse behind the scenes at how the course was created. Today, co-author Susannah Reed tells us how the characters for the course developed.
Where did you get your ideas from for the characters?
I think the starting points for creating characters for your stories are that you want your readers to be able to relate to them, but you want also want them to be engaging and to spark their imagination by offering them something that’s a bit different to their own lives.
So, in conjunction with the team at Cambridge, we decided that we would have children characters of the same age as the users of the course – and a special friend or one with unusual talents that could add the element of surprise.
In Levels 1 and 2 of Guess What! that special friend is the cute robot iPal, who leads the characters through a magic portal in a treehouse, where they have lots of funny adventures. And in Levels 3 and 4, there is the dog Toby who can play football and becomes a skateboard champion. In Levels 5 and 6, they encounter Capu, a clever capuchin monkey they help return to the rainforest, and a yeti who turns out to be a gentle giant.
The ideas for these special friends came from various sources – iPal was a reflection of the importance of technology in modern life, Toby was based on my own dog who loves playing football, and Capu and the Yeti developed out of my story ideas.
How did you decide on their personalities?
Their personalities developed from both how we wanted children using the course to relate to them and what we wanted them to do in the stories. One of the starting points was giving them a variety of interests and diverse talents – just as children in the real world have. So in Levels 1 and 2 we have Tina who is arty and creative, David who is mad about animals, and Olivia who is sporty and spontaneous. As in real life, each personality type has its own strengths and we try to see them taking the initiative leading the way at different times.
The other driver for developing your character’s personalities is by thinking what you want them to do in the stories. For example, as well as wanting them to be fun and exciting, a key feature in the Guess What! stories was to build on the tradition of using stories to promote social values.
In Levels 1 and 2, this included looking at basic values such as learning how to relate to other people effectively – such as being polite, learning to share and being fair. So although iPal is friendly and well meaning and delights the children with his magic tricks and tranformations, he is also unthinkingly naughty at times.
This way of developing iPal was a good way of working with social values as well as providing humour in the stories. It’s more acceptable and we can laugh more easily at a non-human friend who behaves in undesirable ways. And then the real children characters could be in the position of showing iPal having to behave in their world, rather than seeming to need these lessons themselves.
How did you come up with the idea for the story arcs?
We wanted the stories to be exciting and full of adventure and for our readers to be engaged and involved with them. And we also wanted to reflect how our readers grow and develop themselves over the course of a six-level course. So we wanted the concept of what an adventure is to reflect the age group of the users of each level of the course.
So in Levels 1 and 2, the adventure is set with a high level of pure imagination – with the magic portal and treehouse and the fantasy world of iPal and his funny tricks and ways. In Levels 3 and 4, we wanted children to find adventure in their own world, as well as applying their developing problem solving skills. So we decided on a treasure hunt theme that sees the characters racing around their neighbourhoods to find objects – in a scavenger hunt with a mystery prize for Level 3 and for items for an adventure playground in Level 4.
In Levels 5 and 6, we wanted to enhance the problem-solving element of the stories, but also take the fantasy into the digital age with modern technology. So in Level 5, the characters are transported through time and space by a magical tablet, as they find the answers to an international quiz. And in Level 6, they are transported into a computer game, where they follow clues to solve a mystery and complete the game.
Once you’d decided on the story arcs, how did you plan the episodes within them?
As well as fun and adventure, promoting social values was a key aim of the stories, and so I often took a social value as a starting point for a story episode. For example, in Level 3, we had decided that the story arc would be our characters collecting various and random objects for a mystery scavenger hunt. I had a list of social values we wanted to cover – which were compiled mainly from ministry of education documents. These included values such as Be resourceful, Keep your environment clean and Take exercise. I decided that the most varied and pro-active way of showing the characters finding the objects they needed was to show them doing so in a way that also shows the value. For example, they find a painting by painting it themselves for Be resourceful, an old radio by helping tidying up their playground for Keep your environment clean, and by one of the characters winning a watch by taking part in a swimming competition for Take exercise.
Susannah will be back tomorrow with more insights into the characters you’ll find in Guess What!