Numiko, an award winning Leeds based digital creative agency

The BBC have commissioned us to produce a new game to accompany the CBBC television game show, Copycats.

Presented by Sam & Mark, Copycats sees two family teams battle it out in a range of Chinese Whispers based tasks.  The teams take it in turn to copy pictures, actions and show off their musical talent to reveal the winners of the coveted Copycats trophy!

The game follows the theme of the show, consisting of tasks which give the player 5 seconds to memorize the shape on screen.  They then have to re-draw the shape by clicking on squares, or by moving round the grid with the arrow keys and clicking on the space bar.

Aimed at children aged 6-12, it allows kids to have a fun experience, while challenging their memory and copying skills as they progress through the various levels and zones.

The game has gone live this week www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/copycats-game

As part of LDF 2011 we hosted a panel discussion last night about developing for children. On the panel were Pete Robinson and Claudio Franco from Dubit, Karen Lewis from MadeByPi, Dr Gianni Cassidy from Glasgow Caledonian University and me, being Tom Evans from Numiko. The panel and a small crowd of interested people gathered at Dock Street Market, and we kicked off.

Dave Eccles, our chair for the evening, navigated us safely through an evening that proved to be interesting and educational – for me, at least, and I hope the audience enjoyed it just as much. I won’t even try to capture the amount of things we talked about here as there was far too much discussion and I’m too busy to write it up! If you’re after a recap, the audience’s Twitter stream is probably a good place to start as we had our own hashtag, and there’s loads of great titbits and soundbites there.

If anyone has any questions or comments about the things we discussed then feel free to drop me an email or find me on Twitter. There are also a bunch of photos on flickr here.

Emma, Jaron and I spent the day at Playful 2011 on Friday, listening to all kinds of people talk about media, technology, games and playfulness in general.

NB: Because we were sitting upstairs the only photos we’ve got are of the tops of people’s heads, so I’ve borrowed liberally from other attendees’ instagram streams. All photos link to the owner’s stream. Thanks!

It was good fun, although the talks were a bit of a mixed bag. There was some great stuff from Al Robertson, Matt Sheret, Richard Lemarchand and Louise Down, among others – but also some weaker talks and one that was essentially a twenty-minute advert!

More after the jump…

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There’s a really interesting post at Fast Company about a mash-up of Sesame Street and Kinect.

It combines the fun, familiar characters of Sesame Street with the cool full-body interactivity of Kinect, letting kids step into scenes and interact with their favourite characters. In the demo you see children throwing virtual coconuts into a basket held by a muppet (a blue one – he looks familiar, but I can’t remember his name…) and jumping around cute virtual environments.

A lot of the same thinking has been done here as we went through for CBeebies Sing-along; they’re making casual games and experiences that don’t need kids’ complete attention at all times, and trying to avoid “frustrating win-lose states” that can ruin the fun.

It looks like a great idea, and I can see toys/activities/experiences like this becoming the norm for whole generations in years to come!

Numiko have been working with experts at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) to develop a set of three groundbreaking online games for the for pre-schoolers.  The first game to go live is Old MacDonald with the remaining two coming soon.

CBeebies  Sing-along is a presenter-led, interactive musical activity based around nursery rhymes and action songs.  What makes Sing-along special is that it works by sound recognition alone, removing the need for small children to use a keyboard or mouse.  It requires children to interact with songs by singing along, making it possible for children at different stages of development to have fun and learn at the same time.  Words also appear on screen to help with early stage literacy.

The game was tested at GCU’s state-of-the-art facilities, including the eMotion lab and using the latest eye-tracker technology.

Have fun with your little one. Visit CBeebies Singalong

We’ve been working with the CBeebies team to create a fun and user friendly site for Grown-ups. The new website is a place where carers and their children can go for more information about their favourite programmes while encouraging them to learn and play together.

The new site came about due to parents and carers feeling the old site had a lot of really valuable content, but it was difficult to find and wasn’t very inspiring.  Making it easier to navigate, the revamped site has three key sections:  ”Fun Activities”, “Support for You” and “Programmes”.  The “Support For You” section covers issues from nutrition and special needs, to first days in school or nursery and safeguarding children when they are using technology.

An important resource for carers, the features have been written in consultation with healthcare, special needs and Early Years experts.

If you’ve got kids, make this your homepage  http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/

Click here to see our other sites for the BBC.

So, that project that we’re working with CBeebies on (I wrote a blog post about it before, you remember, right?) has just gone live! The first song of three has gone live, and the next two will join it soon.

It’s called CBeebies Singalong, and it’s a suite of songs and games designed for very young children, between two and five. At this age, kids are still developing their fine motor skills and have few preconceptions of what an interface should be like, so we were able to take an exciting,  innovative approach.

CBeebies Singalong lets children interact by singing, shouting and clapping, using a microphone. It combines the familiar, simple interaction of singing along with the engaging rewards of online games, blurring the line between playing a game and joining-in.

Only the first song is live at present, but the next two will be there soon, so check back later.

As we’re working with CBeebies we’ve been able to draw on their pool of hugely entertaining presenters, and so ultimately we’ll have three songs, all fronted by a different presenter. The presence and energy of a real person really brings these songs to life, and the familiarity of CBeebies presenters does a lot to put our young audience at ease.

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