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Alphabetical List of Zupa's Projects
Boost
CLIENT: BBC Schools
YEAR: 2003 - 2006
ROLE: Consultancy, Illustration, Producer
FEATURES: Flash
www.bbc.co.uk/boost (no longer live)
Boost was a pilot project at the BBC aimed at improving literacy amongst Special Educational Needs (SEN) learners. The learning content centred around 16 stories that were aimed at five different levels of literacy ability. The content was written in close collaboration with educational specialists following an intense period of research into the complex issues surrounding SEN users.
Each story was split into several screens with accompanying interactive illustrations and audio files. At certain points within the story the User was presented with a game that had to be completed in order to proceed to the next section of the story. These games provided a fun way to learn core literacy skills such as phonics, information retrieval, sentences and spelling.
The content and interface were customisable by the Users and their teachers. This allowed for a wide range of SEN learners to view the stories in a way that best matched their learning needs and it allowed the teacher to control the activities for classroom use.
As a pilot, the project encountered some teething problems and initially Jasia was asked to consult the BBC team on how best to improve the performance of the Flash whilst retaining the carefully thought out educational aims of the stories. The download rate of the stories was improved by re-drawing some of the illustrations and re-organising the Flash files.
When the Producer left the BBC, Jasia was asked to step into the role in order to complete the aims that had been lain out during the consultation period. This meant co-ordinating internal and external teams as well as rolling up sleeves and getting on with production.
Boost was further reviewed once the Jam curriculum site had been launched and once again Jasia was asked in to offer advice on next steps for the project. It was at this stage that development was ceased and eventually the Boost website was removed from the BBC website.
Images copyright © 2003 - 2006 BBC
CREDITS: Flash Programmer - Steve Kelly, Tiger Team
Designers - AV Studios, Pixel Brothers, Sean Adams
Screenshot from the Crop Circles story
BBC Boost - website
BBC Boost - story console
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