Technology + Creativity at the BBC Feed

Gaming for public good

2020-07-28T09:06:38+00:00

On March 4th 2020, sneaking in before lockdown, BBC Technology Strategy & Architecture in partnership with BBC Academy Fusion hosted and live streamed a great Lunch & Learn event. The topic was using gaming for public good, so I was excited to attend.

The event kicked off with lunch and an opportunity to network and try things out. BBC Blue Room, BBC Research & Development, and guests SpecialEffect demonstrated the latest in games technology. Nearby, BBC Children’s game Nightfall was set up to play. Attendees included interested BBC staff, many of whom had worked in the games industry, and a number of invited guests.

Steffan Powell kicks off the event

We were welcomed by journalist and presenter Steffan Powell. Host of BBC Radio 1’s The Gaming Show and a senior reporter for Newsbeat, Steffan brought subject knowledge along with his enthusiasm and energy. He shared that in the UK video gaming revenue is worth more than music and movies combined. Half the population game. Over 3 million watch eGames. The industry has its own Bafta games awards, and that museums like the V&A have created exhibitions on video games.

The talks kicked off with Si Lumb (BBC Research & Development) and Phil Rich (BBC Digital Partners) providing a snapshot of the gaming industry, and reasons the BBC should take notice and explore gaming as a content medium.

Over the past 6 years, the time 16-25 year olds spend with video games has tripled. More than half would like a career in the industry. Over 70% of 18-35 year olds play video games, and about 46% of gamers are female.

Si Lumb and Phil Rich sharing a snapshot of the gaming industry

The market isn’t all about hardware and game titles. Gaming is increasingly something to watch as a spectator. It has bigger audiences than traditional sporting events thanks to social media, video streaming and services like Twitch. Not surprising when the average video gamer is 43 and raising children, who both play and watch video games. The multi-player social game popular with younger audiences, Fortnite, had a total prize pool of $100,000,000 in 2019, and Netflix consider Fortnite a major competitor for audience time. British eSports are trialling tournaments in schools. And as Si eloquently positioned it, “Strictly Come Dancing is just Battle Royale in sequins”.

Technology improvement enables high quality games to optimise as smaller file sizes, similar to video clips. MS XBox, Amazon and Google are taking gaming into the cloud. Interactive and object-based media add into the mix. While Virtual or Augmented Reality provide more immersive experiences or deep fakes as actors in film or television. Further industry convergence has seen Unreal, a gaming engine, used to flood the Weather Channel studios, build the virtual world in which The Lion King remake was filmed, and create locations and scenery for The Mandalorian TV series.

Match of the Day using green screen in a highly adaptable virtual studio

Augmented reality, interactive video and deep fakes are of interest to the BBC, as are eSports qualifications, Minecraft for educational purposes, innovations addressing physical and mental health issues, providing accessible social interaction... the list goes on. From Newsbeat reports, to its documentary on Hideo Kojima. From This Game Changed My Life podcast, to The Game Show on Radio 1. From experimental content like interactive Casualty and a virtual Queen Vic or Tardis, to Nightfall the game. There’s a lot to gaming, and the BBC is taking notice and exploring.

Recently the BBC Children’s Games team launched Nightfall, their first multiplayer online game for children. Ashleigh Middleton and James Woodham presented the rationale and strategy behind the game.

James Woodham and Ashleigh Middleton presenting Nightfall

Nightfall is set in a dream world, where players are battling anxieties and fears. Players can explore freely and use the light from their torch to extract negativity from the nightmares they encounter. However, they need to collaborate with other players in order to deal with the biggest nightmares. The community of players feedback on what the nightmares should be and how the characters should look. Contracted companies Good Boy and Mira do the game development and artwork.

Aware that games are very popular with children, the team wanted to explore where the audience are. Part of the BBC’s mission “to act in the public interest” is to entertain. For children this can be done within games. The team want to create games that provide a safe, social, collaborative space, live in real time. The games can also take an informative and ethical stance as they are non-commercial. There are no ad purchases. No chatting with strangers. And kids can play with their friends.

For example, Nightfall can introduce temporary branded zones within the game. The first of these is a Blue Planet zone. The zone should help grow the audience and provide marketing opportunity. It also directly addresses known concerns and worries of the audience.

Screenshot as Nightfall introduces the Blue Planet zone

Nightfall and the Blue Planet zone within it are live and proving popular. Other partnerships are being prepared and will go live soon. There are plans to stage scheduled events and challenges. As well as discussions around turning off or disabling the game at night, when children should be sleeping.

The BBC is not alone in recognising the potential of games as a tool for learning and creative innovation. Stephen Reid from Immersive Minds shared inspiring stories and thoughts from their pioneering use of games and other interactive technologies to teach and educate young people.

Stephen Reid shares his enthusiasm and inspiring stories of educating through games

His own Eureka moment came after asking his class to tell him something they knew that he didn’t. One pupil knew how to slow-mo TV by holding the play button on the remote for 6 seconds. Apparently, they found out by experimenting, fearless of breaking something that could be reset or fixed. When he asked the class what this was useful for, he got a roomful of different ideas.

Stephen deduced that kids have a simple process around tools, uninhibited by experience. They identify a problem, find something that works, learn how to use it, and apply it to the problem.

Are we inspiring our students? Are we challenging kids enough, to solve real world problems for social good? In Egypt, Stephen visited a school where the classrooms and attitude were both fun and inspiring. He challenged the kids to find and solve real problems during the three months until his next visit. When he returned, one group had made a drone. They taught themselves how from the internet, including the lithium batteries. The drone was for detecting and countering an airborne plant pathogen affecting their parents rice straw crop.

A history classroom in Egypt sports a full-size stegosaurus skeleton moulding on its outer wall

Elsewhere, Stephen challenged some younger kids to build a hydro-electric power dam with Lego bricks. They learned that energy is created by turbines underneath the dam, not where the water flows over it. Then they recreated their dam in Minecraft to see it working and how weather could affect energy production. One kid worried about the fish in the river and discussed it with their father, who helped devise a solution. The next day they added a series of stepped pools at the side of the dam, so that fish could safely bypass it.

Other students were challenged to recreate a local ruin using Minecraft. They visited and measured the ruin. In the process, learning about its history and the fire that had destroyed the original building. They decided to create the full pre-fire building in Minecraft, using stone for the ruins that remained and wool painted like stone elsewhere. Then they recreated and watched the fire in Minecraft, and 3D-printed their version of the ruin.

Creative games like Minecraft can provide a much richer learning experience. Students could recreate Pompeii, Monet’s studio, world wonders, and more. They can build using bricks or learn and only use code.

In Africa, in a poor area that is lucky to get 3 hours of electricity in a day, Stephen met a man on the street showing kids how to create things from refuse. He provided a laptop and 3D-printer with a few supplies, then showed the man how to use it, along with tinkerCAD and Minecraft. The kids designed and printed small low-cost toys to sell in the city, and over a few months managed to raise enough money to build a school. Yet in the UK 3D-printers languish in school cupboards because no-one knows how to work them.

Stephen’s not short list of games that can be used for educational purposes

Second generation gamers don’t settle for what is given by the developers. They want to modify and hack the game, similar to the early simple gamers of the 70s and 80s.

Little Big Planet can be used for climate change game creation. Assassins Creed and Age of Empire can be used to teach history. Democracy can be used to teach politics. Kerbal Space Program can be used to teach rocket building. Ark can be used to teach about dinosaurs, food chains and ecology systems. Universe Sandbox can be used to teach about the effect of small changes. Riven can be used for teaching languages and number systems. Portal can teach physics. Valiant Hearts can teach about war from a dog’s point of view. Drone can teach about modern warfare and ethics. Interland can teach about internet and data safety. Life Is Strange looks at mental health, depression, culture, and immigration. A Normal Lost Phone covers alcoholism, refugees and more.

And this is only getting started with how games and interactive technology can be used for learning and education.

It’s also important to ensure everyone can participate. Tom Donegan from SpecialEffect spoke about the life-changing impact of making games and technology accessible and inclusive for people with severe disabilities.

Tom Donegan explains the positive impact of making gaming accessible to all

SpecialEffect started out trying to provide access for the physically disabled to play games, initially for educational purposes. While the work is led by an occupational therapist approach, they have found that access to games has a wider impact. Games connect a player socially when they’re unable to do other activities. Games give some independence and sense of achievement, provide a release and are something to look forward to. To some extent, video games level the playing field when playing with others.

Gaming can open doors to enjoyment, creativity and social connection that would otherwise be closed

Sometimes adaptations are as simple as providing a joystick or a couple of suitably large buttons. Other times it requires highly complex multi-modal personalised controls such as an eye-brow switch combined with eye-tracking and voice commands. The recent XBox Adaptive Controller helps simplify creating such custom set-ups.

SpecialEffect also do much collaboration, research and design to develop custom control hardware, such as improved Eye Gaze technology, and interfaces for using it. And the costs are significantly reducing, which also improves accessibility.

The event wrapped up with a panel conversation chaired by Steffan Powell. Discussing the significance of “gaming for the public good” were:

Dr Maria Stukoff – Director of the Salford University Maker Space and Co-Chair of eSports Industry Collaboration,
Stephen Reid – Founder and Director of Immersive Minds and Creative Consultant with Microsoft Education, who had previously spoken about his work during the event,
Jordan Erica Webber – a freelance presenter and journalist who is the resident gaming expert for Channel 5’s The Gadget Show and co-author of Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us: (about life, philosophy and everything),
Elle Osili-Wood – an award-winning video game presenter and journalist, named as one of the most influential women in gaming.

Steffan chairing the panel on gaming for public good at the BBC

Steffan kicked off by asking about their perceived attitude of the BBC in regards to gaming. Jordan wishes BBC departments would talk with each other more, to move beyond the basics of what video games are and how they are not damaging children. Elle is working on several BBC projects about the artistic, scientific benefits and technology aspects of games, and would like more stakeholders to move past the concept of games being juvenile or insignificant. Maria described games as content-rich immersive storytelling not dissimilar to TV dramas or documentaries and would love to see the BBC have its own Twitch channel. Education works well by doing and problem solving, and it’s surprising the BBC isn’t already doing more. Stephen meets similar attitudes in education with teachers, who would love the BBC to add some weight to the positive side of games and speed up the needed change in attitude, so that conversations no longer start on the back foot.

The next question was about trends. Elle, an editor for PlayStation’s YouTube channel, recently helped create a 12-episode professionally edited series of playing a game, based around the challenges. Jordan highlighted that online content for audiences has been around for some time and is becoming more professional and interactive with the audience. Maria shared that Fortnite’s best player Ninja has 231 million hours of live-watched play, ratings competitive with the top sports and Netflix shows. She also pointed out that XR (extended reality) will change the gaming and eSports environment to be even more immersive in significant ways. Jordan pointed out that the BBC could add quality control to eSports production that YouTube doesn’t or could learn from. Stephen shared that 84m people in US will watch eSports by 2021, almost as much as NFL, so eSports is definitely a big trend.

When asked what the BBC could do differently in the gaming space, Stephen jumped on education as a key area that isn’t being addressed yet, in particular supporting teachers. Elle shared how games improve literacy, social and communication skills, can improve physical fitness, emotional regulation, and help with conditions like ADHD and Dyslexia, and that there are numerous scientific studies proving all that. Stephen pointed out that gaming is play based learning, though it has become digital, and we need to advocate more for play.

Asked if there is room for more representation on TV, there was a resounding yes. Elle pointed out that online and gaming is now more mainstream than TV. Jordan shared that suitable content formats are needed for TV, such as documentary, as daily news on eSports has too slow a turnaround. Maria pointed out the need for regulatory shaping and normalising of gaming as content.

Asked if the BBC should make games, as they did 20 years ago, again there was a resounding yes. The Hitchhiker’s text adventure game was fondly remembered.

Asked about their opinion on the balance between play and education in games, Stephen shared insights from a recent 3-year study on games for learning Maths, where the kids hacked the game to do what they wanted. Kids recognise enforced learning. Environment, mechanics and narrative all matter. Elle emphasised the importance to work with people with experience as storytellers, writers and researchers.

Final thoughts hoped the BBC would become more proactive than reactive in regard to gaming, with more around the stories and art of games, content no one else would create. Steffan shared that more is happening, and Stephen mentioned BBC Build-it Scotland, that recreated the country 1:1 in Minecraft, and got over 10,000 responses to build local places.

With more time afterward to check out Nightfall and the latest in games technology, there was plenty to talk about as the event wrapped up. Hopefully this is just the beginning of much more to follow.

Find out more and stay tuned for further updates at: https://canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/gaming-for-the-public-good/

CBeebies adds new Peter Rabbit and Hey Duggee games to Playtime Island app

2020-06-09T09:00:00+00:00

Parents looking to keep the kids entertained this summer will be pleased to hear that we’re launching two brand new games in the CBeebies Playtime Island app, based on two of our best-loved shows.

Hey Duggee: The Paddling Badge is a brand new multiplayer game, in which little ones can choose their favourite member of The Squirrel Club and earn their paddling badge in a fun race against the other squirrels. And the multiplayer functionality means that even though kids might not be able to go to a swimming pool at the moment, they can enjoy racing their siblings or parents digitally and have some fun in the pool!

Peter Rabbit Running Wild is a follow up to the hugely popular Hop To It game, where kids can choose their favourite from Peter, Lily or Benjamin and explore exciting areas like Mr McGregor’s Garden or Jeremy Fisher’s Lake. Interactive paw prints offer kids lots of things to discover in these places, or they can go and find characters like Jemima Puddle-Duck and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

Alongside these two new games one of our most popular games, Waffle and Friends, is also getting an update. A brand new fairground level lets two players explore the funfair together and play fun mini games.

CBeebies Playtime Island is an app for families to enjoy together, where kids can learn as they play, and as part of this update we’ve also redesigned it to make it even easier for children to play independently. The Playtime Island app has always put CBeebies favourites like Go Jetters, Mr Tumble and Bing at children’s fingertips, and in this major update we’ve redesigned the island with kids in mind from the very beginning – so they can do this even quicker.

Designed for independent exploration and uninterrupted discovery of a vast catalogue of games, Playtime Island is a safe, delightful and engaging space for children to spend their time. The updated app also includes an enhanced download manager setting, so that parents can control the size of the app, quickly downloading or deleting games as their child’s interests change.

We hope that parents and children enjoy the new games and the new look for the CBeebies Playtime Island app, which is available for free from the Apple, Google Play and Amazon app stores.

Delivering daily lessons during lockdown

2020-04-17T08:43:00+00:00

A little over a week ago, Tony Hall announced the “biggest push on education in the BBC’s history” including a plan to enhance our free online study support service BBC Bitesize.

In the space of a few short weeks, Covid-19 has had a major impact on the way we all live our lives. Entering this period of national lockdown has inevitably changed the way we work, communicate, shop and exercise. People across the country are turning to digital technologies like never before; the ultimate digital disruptor.

With schools across the UK closed, the normal systems we all rely upon to educate our children day-in/day-out have been put under enormous strain too. Teachers are having to work at a distance — many for the first time, and without having had time to adapt lessons and strategies. Parents have become teaching assistants overnight, and are juggling lessons from the kitchen table, alongside caring responsibilities, and in many cases also now having to work from home.

Increased demand for home schooling

Since schools closed, we’ve been working to help parents and learners with the challenge of home schooling.

BBC Bitesize is designed to help students around the UK with learning, revision and homework.

For over 20 years it has complemented what schools and teachers do by providing support for learners aged 5 to 16+, across a wide range of school subjects. It also supports children and young people’s wellbeing and career choices.

In the 2 weeks preceding the Easter holidays, we’ve seen a huge new demand for home schooling resources.

We’re pleased to have been serving over 1 million unique visitors each weekday with content mainly from our existing Bitesize ‘Learn & Revise’ offer.

Daily online lessons

From 20th April 2020 we’ll begin adding new content to BBC Bitesize in the form of special daily lessons in English, Maths and other core subjects. Our brand new offer has been specially designed with home schooling in mind.

Lessons will bring together videos, quizzes, games and activities from Bitesize, elsewhere around the BBC, and from selected educational partners too.

While my editorial colleagues are (extremely) busy co-ordinating the delivery of ~150 lessons a week, the Bitesize product team have been working hard to make it easy for parents and students to navigate all of this new content.

We know how important it is that our users can quickly find resources relevant to their age-range and ability-level. Moving to this daily cadence and having parents take a more active role means that we’ve had to come up with some new ways to navigate around. Luckily we have standard website components and UI patterns to speed us along the way.

Elsewhere around the BBC

Meanwhile, sets are being designed, and scripts and schedules written for the various TV and Radio programmes which the BBC is planning to broadcast throughout the Summer Term too.

It’s pretty exciting to know that Bitesize will be on Red Button, BBC FOUR, BBC Scotland, S4C, BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds.

We’re turning the Bitesize homepage into a destination where you can find information about all of these services.
It’s quite a challenge to showcase this breath of offer simply — but one which our designers and engineers have accepted gladly.

Top team

Saying that delivering daily lessons during lockdown has been ‘ambitious’ — would be quite an understatement. 4 weeks ago, with the rest of the country, BBC Children’s and Education teams became remote workers overnight. Bitesize daily is being built in spare rooms, at kitchen tables and on the sofa (but only when we can convince our kids to take a break from the games console).

We’re putting ‘lean’ product development through its paces. We’re remaining focussed, we’re talking a lot, and importantly, we’re trusting our brilliant people to do their thing.

It really helps to have the support of management, colleagues around the BBC, our families, organisational partners and of course each other.

We’ll continue to develop in the coming months to make sure there’s an even greater range of resources available to parents and kids, as we learn more about the best way to educate our kids as the UK responds to Coronavirus.

Visit the BBC Bitesize website to find the latest daily lessons (starts 20th Apr 2020).

Own It: Wellbeing and isolation update

2020-04-06T09:50:49+00:00

With feeds and social media bringing bad news about coronavirus around the clock, this is a particularly perilous time for the wellbeing of children. Some young people may focus on details of the news and want to talk about it all the time – others may not want to talk about it at all. It is important that children are supported as much as possible in dealing with their feelings, particularly if they are sad, angry or afraid.

Own It is a BBC app that has been designed to provide support for children’s wellbeing as they use their smartphones. It consists of a keyboard and a companion app. The keyboard features AI technology that can assess and intervene so that the right help can be provided at the right time. Once the app is installed, the keyboard becomes the default for every text input field in all apps and web pages.

The Own It companion app provides insights and feedback to the user on how they are using their smartphone. Entertaining and informative content is presented that allows children to grow their resilient behaviours and to develop a better understanding of how their actions can directly affect wellbeing.

To better help children during these unprecedented and anxious times, we have developed and released new features for Own It that seek to provide directed support on coronavirus and issues surrounding the crisis:

Dictionary:

The Own It keyboard uses an underlying dictionary to support its autocorrect, autocomplete and next-word-prediction functions. This dictionary is based on how children speak and the language that they use on popular platforms. To ensure that children are able to express themselves about the current crisis, words related to the issue need to be available within the dictionary. With this latest update, additions have included words such as coronavirus, covid, and pandemic.

Interventions:

When a child is typing a message, the Own It text analysis module will give live feedback on the sentiment of the message and also provides an intervention when the system determines hate, toxicity or a number of safeguarding issues. The intervention can be passive or a full-screen message – providing a nudge or friction to give the user a chance to consider their actions or whether they need help. A new addition to this system is the classification of messages related to coronavirus and isolation. The method looks for the occurrence of words or phrases concerning the issue and then measures if the emotion sentiment is anger, fear or worry. If a user were to type “I’m so lonely with this isolating”, a passive intervention would be presented supporting the child in understanding that it is okay to be worried and they’re not alone –the user is then offered a link to helpful content within the companion app. If the child was to type “I like isolation, I get to read more books”, no intervention would be presented. The nuance of when to intervene is important, it is key part of the user experience that interventions feel helpful and not an annoyance.

Collections:

Within the Own It companion app, there is a For You section that contains content which the system has determined to be important for that user. A new feature added here is Collections. These are swipe-able carousels that contain curated content concentrated on a topic. The first two collections launched with this release are The Lowdown Lockdown and Feeling Anxious or Scared?

The Lockdown Lowdown – entertaining and informative content that inspires children to live their best digital online life while in isolation – with celebrity contributions from pop stars, YouTubers and vloggers.

Feeling Anxious or Scared? – a collection of videos and articles that provide support for children during a time that they are away from their day-to-day support network of friends. Articles cover how to tackle fears and worries, de-stressing and support in understanding that it is normal to have ups and downs.

All of the new features uphold the strict data privacy requirements that have been applied to the Own It app. All of the machine learning and AI is run on the user’s device. No personal data is transferred to the BBC and no messages are logged. All data that is generated within the system is stored and handled locally on the phone. Data privacy is regarded as sacrosanct.

Own It is available on the iOS App Store and Android Play Store. It is designed specifically for smartphones. If you have a child who has recently received their first phone or would benefit from support during these unique times, then encourage them to install Own it and let us know how you get on.

https://www.bbc.com/ownit/take-control/own-it-app

Own It, the app: Six technical challenges

2019-09-18T11:34:25+00:00

Young people now receive their first connected smartphone between the ages of 8 and 12. They may have used a shared device up to that point, but now, in their hands is their first personal carry-everywhere device.

The internet is a force for good; however it hasn't been designed specifically for children. With their own smartphone, young people now have access to a glittering array of experiences which they will explore more freely than they would on a shared device. The Own It app is designed to support and guide children as they make that journey.

Own It consists of a custom keyboard and companion application. The keyboard features technology and machine learning that can assess, intervene and provide help for areas including bullying, hate, toxicity, data privacy and emotions. Once installed, the Own It keyboard becomes the default for all text input fields, covering apps and web applications. This allows the system to provide in-the-moment support, in many cases, before a message is sent – encouraging children to stop and think before they share.

The Own It companion app allows the user to see how they are using their device alongside being able to keep a diary of their feelings. Content is presented that aids children in understanding the available insights and guides them to develop resilient behaviours.

The Own It app was a complex product to develop with many technical challenges to overcome. What follows is a whistle-stop tour through six of the key ones:

1: Providing live feedback within a keyboard

A major feature of Own It is that the keyboard can provide the right support at the right time. To enable this we needed the text to be analysed as it is being typed. A text analysis module, powered by machine learning models, assesses the text for hate, toxicity, emotions, privacy data and a series of safeguarding issues. The system will instantly respond with an intervention where necessary and will also keep the user informed on the emotion sentiment of the message.

When children are in human social situations, they may step over an adult imposed red-line or social norm – but they will, usually, quickly realise that there is a problem because they can see reactions on the faces of the adults or their peers. Once the issue is identified, the child can adjust their behaviour to quickly fit into the norm for the situation. When engaging in online activities, there is little in the way of visual cues, red lines can be crossed in terms of behaviour and the user may not realise until much later. The Own It keyboard is seeking to fix this via the means of a feedback mechanism. By putting a face on the keyboard, the user can see how the message may be received. The face will display how the recipient may interpret the message – this nudges the sender to think about the tone of the message and consider adjusting it to something more palatable.

The face takes a feed from an emotion sentiment classifier that has been developed for this task. The classifications have been derived from the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, a measurement method that has underpinned much of the project design.

When issues with hate or toxicity, privacy or safeguarding are determined, the keyboard will present a related intervention. This is displayed in one of two forms.

A passive intervention will give the child information but without interrupting the flow of input – for example, “Are you sure you should be sharing your phone number?” – We don’t know who the recipient of the message is going to be, so raising the question to the child, allows them to think and judge if it is the right course of action.

A full intervention covers the keyboard entirely. The user is forced to acknowledge the issue by either dismissing the intervention or finding out further information. Own It will never stop a message from being sent, it just seeks to ensure the child is supported as fully as possible.

2: On-device encapsulation

During the discovery phase of the project, we built a proof-of-concept text analyser. This allowed us to begin to experience, measure and comprehend how real-time analysis could work. For the first prototype, a cloud-based solution was implemented - 3.5 GB of machine learning models and word-embeddings hosted on a server. For both data security and speed of response reasons, we wanted to move all text analysis to function entirely on the users’ device.

It seemed like a stretch, but it was essential to explore whether we could achieve the objective of miniaturising the model ensemble to the extent required. An iteration of our proof of concept applied FastText compression to the text classification, producing a first on-device build that totalled less than 40mb, only 1% of the original size. Some accuracy was lost with the models, but we had proved that a serviceable model ensemble could be placed onto a smartphone to achieve the product aspirations.

When moving to production, different compression methods were applied to the models that allowed the size to be reduced to less than 20mb. Further work on the datasets and model design meant that the final f1, recall and precision scores were better than the results from our original 3.5 GB model set.

A key element that enabled the process was to establish a workflow that enabled the model ensemble to be constructed and then ported to both Android and iOS. On-device machine learning is still in its infancy, certainly in terms of natural language processing – however, a route was found using a Keras CNN base model. The Keras model can be transformed to function with CoreML on iOS and with Tensorflow Lite on Android. Developing and testing on the single Keras model reduced the amount of resource required to ensure the efficacy of the system, as well as providing parity between the platform experiences.

3: Ensuring the quality of feedback

The data sets used to train the machine learning models - for hate, toxicity and emotion sentiment - consisted of full sentences. The sort a person would send in a message or put into a note. However, when a user is on a device, inputting text, the sentences don't just appear whole - they are typed in sequentially. This is problematic for a system that is making a prediction on an input, when that input is incrementally changing.

The initial builds and prototypes of Own It provided an experience that showed a confused emotion sentiment feedback mechanism, certainly when the early part of a sentence was being typed. We needed a method to neutralise those first few entered words of a sentence while they were being entered, only engaging the text analysis when there was enough context to make a reasonable prediction on the emotion sentiment. Word or character count was a far too simplistic method, giving poor results. Analysis of the grammatical construct of sentences was a step too far - certainly for a project that already had many complex moving parts.

The implemented solution to this problem was surprisingly simple but provided a significant improvement to the user perception of the issue. 1/2 million messages, mostly from young people were analysed and a collection was made of the most common 'sentence starts'. That is, words that are present in a sentence before the object, subject or other context is imparted. For example:

What was the...
Can I have a…
Thank you for your…

The list was filtered down to contain only the most common ‘starts’, eventually totalling less than 2000. When a user types a message that matches or partially matches anything in the list, the text isn't analysed and therefore the visual feedback is neutral. Because the list only contains partial sentences, the text analysis and related responses kick in as soon as the emerging sentence begins to have meaning. This function reduced the occurrence of early and uninformed analysis by an amount that has all but taken the problem off the table. While restricting variances in sentiment response early in most sentences, the system still allows short or uncommon sentences to be analysed and responded to. The user experience is much more consistent, allowing trust to grow in the asserted feedback on display.

4: Restricting the occurrence of bias within results

All data contains bias – much of the training data for Own It came from human sources, so the biases are innate. The challenge for Own It was to counter the bias, both in the training sets and by using pre-processing methods, so that the outcomes are as unaffected as possible.

One area of potential bias came up with the emotion sentiment classification, where the displayed representation is a facial reaction to the emotion of the message. There was a worry that protected characteristics, such as race, gender and religion could have a possibility of affecting the results and provide responses that could cause offence (a misplaced angry or frightened face). As the key function of the emotion sentiment classifier is to determine only the emotion of a given sentence, the presence of any protected characteristic should not affect that response. With this taken as a rule, we needed to remove the protected words before analysis – without affecting the construct of the sentence. A ‘Bias Neutraliser’ list was drawn up containing the characteristics and grammatical variations.

This Bias Neutraliser list is parsed when the message is being pre-processed ahead of submission to the text analysis models. If a word or phrase matches the list, then it is neutralised within the sentence. To retain the sentence structure, the matched word is replaced with a neutral word – in the implementation, literally the word “neutral”. So, “the Christian walked down the stairs” is passed through the analysis as “the neutral walked down the stairs”. In this case, the word ‘Christian’ is given no opportunity to influence the emotion sentiment results.

The implemented Bias Neutraliser pre-processing affects only the system responses and provides a layer of support for the emotion sentiment analysis, allowing it to focus on its core purpose.

5: Developing Children's focussed keyboard

When trying to make a keyboard that is to be used by children – it isn’t just all of the basic elements that need to be in place, they each need to be developed with a young audience in mind. Autocorrect, autocomplete and next-word prediction must perform to a high standard AND be relevant for the users.

To support these core keyboard functions, we developed a children’s dictionary. An analysis of messages written by young people produced a word density map of the most used words and their frequency of use. The result was compared to a standard adult-focussed list and merged to create a core system dictionary that ensured the broadest range of users could benefit.

With improvements driven by words commonly used by young people, there was still an omission related to the uptake of new online language by young audiences who engage with the plethora of available platforms. New words and phrases emerge and are used within messaging on specific platforms, a growing expansion of the lexicon driven by new technology and its users. Whether it is yeet, thicc, poggers or oomfs (look them up - the etymology of the chat speak area is a fascinating story, one not for this blog, however.). The Own It keyboard is designed to work on all media platforms seeking to make the experiences as friction-free as possible. For this to work well, the functions need to be cognizant of these new words. A review of this ‘chat-speak’ allowed us to create a glossary that informed an expansion of the dictionary, giving it a wide enough set if terms for now, but this will be an ongoing journey.

6: Ensuring data privacy

Data privacy within the Own It experience has been a primary objective. It is the reason we have encapsulated the machine learning models onto the device and is also the reason we don't key log any of the data. When a message is typed, it is passed for analysis. Once a user sends or deletes their message - no record of it is stored. A data point is generated for each message sent. This contains just the sentiment of the message and a flag for any interventions types that may have occurred. This data point is placed in a secure data store on the device and can only be accessed by the companion app - the system will analyse these data points, looking for insights which can be presented to the user via support content.

The setup of the Own It system gives the machine learning a closed loop. A user can report false positives. If they receive an intervention, they can report that it was incorrect - by investigating the patterns of these false positives, we can work out where some of the classifiers aren't working as well as expected and put effort into finding and shaping further datasets that can help to improve the accuracy of these models.

Outside of this user feedback loop, the Own It team will be looking to improve the datasets and implement new techniques to increase the accuracy and performance of the full machine learning ensemble.

The advancement and proliferation of AI has created a window of problem-solving capabilities. With these new capabilities, comes a need to act both ethically and with responsibility. Within the Own It product, we have endeavoured to employ machine learning for good and treat personal data as sacrosanct. It is crucial for users to have confidence that the system is there to support them and is worthy of trust. Within the companion app, we have content that describes how Own It works. Written in an easily digestible form, it seeks to add a layer of transparency that will grow trust in Own It and that it is there to provide dedicated help to the individual.

To develop and build the Own It product machine learning and analysis elements, the BBC worked in partnership with Switzerland-based Privately. Some of Privately's previously developed models were enhanced and encapsulated onto devices, while new models and related technologies were co-developed and implemented. The audience facing elements of Own It were developed and built in partnership with Glasgow’s Chunk Digital.

Own It is now available on the iOS App Store and Android Play Store. It is designed specifically for smartphones. If you have a child who is about to receive their first phone or has recently done so, then get them to install Own It and let us know how you get on.

Introducing Nightfall

2019-04-24T12:55:28+00:00

Today we’ve released a brand new game called Nightfall into Beta, which means we can continue testing and getting feedback from people before it fully launches. We’re excited because it’s the BBC’s first multiplayer online game, and something new we’re trying for audiences aged 8-13+ years old.

The game begins when the players fall asleep, challenging young people and their friends to take on the role of Nightfallers – guardians of light fighting against darkness, and battling to banish every last nightmare from the dream world.

Once in the Nightfall dream world, players can take part in solo play while they find their feet and build their skills, but to make real progress in the game, players need to work together to stand against the tougher ‘Nightmare’ challenges.

We like the idea of young people collaborating to tackle nightmares together, rather than competing against each other, and children seem to like it too as this feature has proven popular in testing so far. We hope this gives them the idea they conquer their worries, and that they don’t have to do it alone either.

We’re also exploring some BBC settings for future nightmares. We’re thinking big – like how some of our best-known TV programmes could be brought to life in the game, and even how Radio brands and beyond could be a part of the Nightfall world as well. It’s very early stages but we are testing some exciting ideas behind the scenes.

As you may know, we already offer younger audiences a range of games on CBeebies and CBBC online and in our children’s apps. They allow our audiences to interact and play with their favourite BBC programmes and characters in new and interesting ways - like Danger Mouse, Dumping Ground, and Furchester Hotel for even younger audiences.

To date, those games have served great purpose in bringing our show brands to the ‘gamers’ in our audience. Building on that success, Nightfall is an exploration of how gaming is evolving as an entertainment format for younger audiences. Young players are becoming savvier than ever before and in response to this shift, one of our key focus points has been around the format of gaming itself. We want to talk to the audience in the most genuine language possible, a language, which now is for many, a native one.

In creating Nightfall we’ve looked at the games industry, assessing which aspects feel genuine to the gaming audience, while still serving our core mission to Inform, Educate & Entertain. Nightfall is an attempt at producing a game true to the expectations of gaming fans, so we can ultimately bring our brands to them in a format, language and tone they already understand, enjoy and welcome with open arms.

Underpinning our approach to game design are the principles we apply to all of our digital products for children – creating brilliant, safe, and positive online experiences. For example, in Nightfall there are social elements, like Emojis, but these have been designed to ensure young people are kept safe by only allowing the use of a pre-defined set of messages, such as a smiley or sad face. We also provide the players with a pre-defined username when they join and we don’t have a free text messaging system, so private information can’t be passed around in game further enhancing our approach to privacy.

Our other games are typically driven by a single programme or character, whereas Nightfall has been designed as a standalone game, able to bring in a range of other BBC brands. Designing the game this way means it’s not just for fans of one particular show or character – it works for a wide range of our existing audiences and, importantly, for younger gamers who may or may not be regular BBC audiences.

As I say, we’re in the early stages of exploring what various BBC brands could look like in Nightfall. We hope that fans of our TV shows will be surprised and delighted if one of their favourites makes an appearance, while others might discover them for the first time. And others still will simply enjoy the game for what it is. That’s been a big driving force behind Nightfall – making a game that people will simply love to play, together.

The Nightfall Beta phase will see a limited audience group playing the game. Players will be able to sign up to play via the existing BBC iD system. Once registered, players will be able to visit the Beta website and collect an ‘access ticket’ until the initial batch run out. We’ll regularly release more access tickets as we grow and evolve the game throughout the Beta. Those unable to secure a ticket straight away will be able to request one online and we’ll add more once we get enough requests. We’re aiming to discover some insights around whether this approach is right for our audiences, and with their input, how and where to take the evolution of the game.

So for now, you can have a go at getting a ticket to the Nightfall Beta here.

Mixital to close

2019-04-24T08:27:57+00:00

In 2015, we launched Mixital to help young people become digital makers. Brands from Doctor Who to EastEnders to Strictly got involved to inspire fans to make games, videos, animations, scripts and even dancing robots.

In all, more than one million new creations have been submitted to the BBC using Mixital’s maker tools. And it has won or been nominated for six national awards – including a Children’s Bafta.

Its key success was in simplifying digital making to enable everyone – including those with only basic digital skills - to get creative with the BBC. It meant audiences could engage in new ways with their favourite brands. And the brands themselves could showcase the creativity of their fans.

“Doctor Who is always looking for new ways to engage with its fans. We had nearly 100,000 original games submitted using the game maker kit that featured all the Doctor Who characters. And we’ve had thousands of scripts sent in too. It shows how creative our community is and how much they like to engage with us even when the show’s not on air,” said Matt Rogers, Digital Producer, Doctor Who.

The BBC is now building on these learnings and exploring how we might best incorporate creative participation into what we do online. That means we’ll be closing down Mixital over the next year and helping our creative communities grow further on bbc.co.uk.

We’ll also be sharing the insights and learnings from Mixital with partners like Nesta and Freeformers who collaborated with us in setting up Mixital.

Mixital was launched as part of the BBC’s Make It Digital campaign. It built on the insights from Nesta’s Next Gen. Report (2011) and Young Digital Makers Report (2015) that highlighted the growing skills gap in making with technology.

Digital technologies are rapidly changing how we learn, the skills we need and the future of work. It’s becoming increasingly important for young people to get creative with these technologies.

“Our research shows how vital digital skills and creativity are to the future of employment. And also the huge appetite young people have to make digitally. Mixital built on the work we did with the Digital Makers Fund and, in turn, we look forward to building further on its insights and learnings,” said Joysy John, Director of Education, Nesta.

The programme commissioned original research and worked directly with young people. The findings highlighted the need for easy-to-use maker kits and a safe, fun space to experiment, learn new skills, build confidence and showcase submissions - all essential ingredients of creativity.

BBC Executive Product Manager Jon Howard said: “Children were taking part in creative activities as entertainment. This wasn’t just casual engagement; the quality of the creations demonstrated a high level of skill. Most surprising and exciting were the emergent behaviours, young people using the digital tools in ways that weren’t originally conceived – devising games that we hadn’t thought possible. We knew we’d uncovered a rich seam of creativity among young people.”

One of the innovations underpinning Mixital was the Youth Panel: a group of 18-21 year olds who met the BBC production team regularly to help shape the product. They even built and launched their own maker kit with BBC Radio 1Xtra.

“It’s been great working with Mixital. The Youth Panel – many of whom were Freeformers – really enjoyed working alongside BBC engineers and designers to create and launch their own product. I know how much they learned from these experiences,” said Adam Freeman, CEO of Freeformers.

From April 2019, it will no longer be possible to register with Mixital or submit any new content using the tools. And from April 2020, Mixital itself will be removed from public view.

For more information please see Mixital FAQs.

CBeebies Get Creative - Inspiring creativity in our youngest audience

2018-10-22T23:05:00+00:00

This week CBeebies has launched Get Creative; a brand new app aiming to inspire creativity in our youngest audience. Through a range of unique experiences and featuring our biggest brands, children can build their creative confidence in an exploratory, open-ended world with no limits.

This is the latest innovation to be delivered as part of the Kids 2020 strategy, which is the biggest investment in digital content and experiences for children in a generation. Get Creative offers a compelling range of creative experiences built around CBeebies brands that our users love. The app will sit alongside our established CBeebies apps, Playtime Island and Storytime, and offer both a safe space for kids and an app that parents can trust.

At CBeebies, we know how vital creativity is in children’s social and emotional development. The Get Creative product has been developed to primarily to serve our 3-5 year old audience, fulfilling their key needs of self-expression and independence. Still, the product design process has worked carefully to make all experiences appealing for a broader age range of children and, importantly, for all abilities. Younger children are easily able to get creative in the simplest form and the open-ended design of experiences allows older children to build their creative skills in more involved play.

Get Creative is set in a crazy, messy and magical 3D factory, which instantly sparks imagination and encourages children to explore. The app has been designed around a simple brand led navigation, to allow quick and easy access to creative play with their favourite brand characters including Hey Duggee, Go Jetters and Bitz and Bob.

The Get Creative team have developed the app with children at the heart of the process, from co-creating initial concept ideas to shaping the finer details of the interface to make it as easy to use as possible.

The app launches with four unique creativity experiences covering magic painting, toy making, sound drawing and storytelling. This unique set of tools offers children the opportunity to make what they can’t elsewhere. The experiences have been specifically designed as intuitive, unrestrained, re-playable and have the ability to be used independently without an adult’s help.

Magic Paint – A delightful drawing tool where kids can use different paint, tapes, stickers and stencils and watch their creations come to life!
Terrific Toys – Children can create their own mix and match toys and play with them in a dedicated playground area.
Sound Doodles – An innovative experience offering kids the opportunity to make music from their doodles.
Play Puppets – Children can direct their very own episodes of their favourite CBeebies shows by animating puppets, props and watching their performances.

Get Creative features a gallery underneath the factory floor, which showcases all creations in one place, allowing children to continue play at a touch of a button. Along with a simple, app wide reward system, these product features allow children to celebrate their success and feel a real sense of achievement.

Regular creative challenges will be featured in the app, offering more inspiration and ways for children to Get Creative. These will also be promoted across our TV and web platforms to encourage their participation.

The launch version of Get Creative is just the start, and we have a packed product roadmap with regular additions coming in following months. With Christmas creative challenges, additional creative experiences and scaling of the number of our most well loved CBeebies characters, there will be many reasons for children to want to return regularly to the app to Get Creative!

Introducing the BBC’s first voice experiences for children

2018-09-03T09:57:59+00:00

Earlier this year, I wrote about how we’ve been exploring new areas for interactive voice content, involving some of our most familiar brands and characters for children. It’s part of our plans to invest in content that informs, educates and entertains children in response to the changing ways they consume media. A recent YouGov report confirmed that Smart speakers are fast-becoming part of this mix, with 11% of UK households owning at least one device and almost a third of those owning at least two devices.

Today we’re launching the new BBC Kids Skill for Alexa devices, which features our first set of children’s experiences for smart speakers. The Skill gives our youngest audiences new and exciting ways of interacting with some of our best-loved characters like Justin Fletcher, Andy and the Go Jetters.

The challenge has been to re-imagine these very visual properties for Voice but equally, because they have been so well conceived and the audio world of these properties is instantly recognisable, they lend themselves well to the medium and we’re really pleased with the results.

The three games all offer a range of ways to play along that are unique to voice platforms. They involve elements of play that we know children love, like dancing, music and quizzes, but also help children to listen and identify sounds, to pay close attention, learn facts… and of course, have some fun.

For example,the Go Jetters game lets children train at the Go Jet Academy by taking Ubercorn’s Funky Facts Quiz. This teaches children something new, helps them focus and gives them a chance to play for the ultimate prize – the chance to become an honourary Go Jetter.We’re massive Go Jetters fans in my household so the challenge is going to be making sure the adults let the children have a go…

The BBC Kids Skill for Alexa devices is the latest in our experiments with Voice formats, led by Executive Editor Mukul Devichand and Head of Products Andrew Webb. The team they’re assembling works across disciplines, bringing producers, designers and software together.

If you’re interested in other examples of our work you can read my earlier post about the approach we’re taking and the areas we’re exploring, and the launch of our first BBC voice service here.

Newsround, nanoservices and serverless

2018-07-11T10:54:47+00:00

Newsround is one of the key propositions within BBC Children’s as a go-to news service for children.

Over the past 6 months we’ve transitioned Newsround away from a legacy, on-premise technical stack over to a serverless, cloud based infrastructure.

In this post I’m going to talk about the technical strategy behind migrating Newsround to the cloud and how we maximised re-use, reduced duplication, fostered collaboration, and shipped an entire product on a serverless platform from the ground up.

For the past 3 years Newsround has been operating as a site hosted on our World Service platform, a part of BBC Online which delivers news for 29 different languages.

Newsround operated as another “language” with a different look and feel to the other BBC News language sites.

Currently, the BBC is in the middle of a large scale migration away from our on premise hosting platform called Forge, where the World Service platform is currently hosted, and into the cloud. At the time of writing this almost all product teams are now solely building products in the cloud whilst Forge is due to be decommissioned over the forthcoming months.

Shipping value quickly

Most sites on bbc.co.uk/.com such as www.bbc.co.uk/arts, www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc and www.bbc.co.uk/news have independent tech stacks. Some components are re-used between sites, and a common platform layer provides the tools for creating and storing content. Neil Craig goes into that in more detail in his post “How we deliver BBC Web Pages to the Internet”.

The Newsround engineering team started to come together late September 2017 and were faced with an immediate challenge: “What technical strategy allows us to start delivering value quickly?”.

We had a few requirements for the newly migrated product, including being able to add new features, support all existing content types currently in use today, be a like-for-like replacement as well as maintaining backwards compability with the previous website.

In order to successfully migrate Newsround, we explored several technical solutions, including: spinning up a brand new application stack with cloud infrastructure and build servers, waiting for World Service to finish their migration out of Forge or re-build Newsround using our own in-house serverless platform.

We decided against spinning up a brand new cloud infrastructure, due to the amount of investment, development effort and on-going maintenance it would require. We also decided against waiting for the World Service migration, as ultimately it would prevent Newsround from being able to build any new features in the interim.

With this in mind it was clear we needed a technical strategy that allowed us to deliver value quickly, while still maintaining the level of quality the audience expects from the BBC — it was clear that choosing a serverless approach would enable us to do just that.

Reusable serverless nanoservices

BBC teams across Design + Engineering have been collaborating over the years on a serverless platform built on React and Node called Morph.
Morph allows teams to build small, self-contained React components, which are pushed to Git, built and autodeployed into Amazon Web Services.
Morph supports both server and client side renders of React components and makes them available on an API endpoint which can be consumed from other applications or directly from the audience behind the public bbc.co.uk/bbc.com domain.

Morph is asynchronous; it is backed by multiple message queues which render React components and fetch data, making Morph extremely efficient when under heavy load (millions of requests per second). Morph by default will serve cached versions of pages and asynchronously re-render them if the underlying data or component has changed.

We call each component within Morph a nanoservice as they’re very small, stateless, versioned and exposed over HTTPS. These components accept props as parameters on the URL and return a BBC-wide standardised payload envelope as the response body, which looks a little like this:

This envelope format gives other services, such as cloud applications hosted on EC2 or static webpages, across the BBC the ability to consume and share nanoservices served by Morph.

React ships with the ability to create higher order components, and that is no different on Morph. A higher order component is simply a component composed from one or more other components, which ultimately allows entire webpages to be built and served by Morph.

Morph has support for building JSON/XML/any other data format APIs too. Matthew Clark, our Head of Architecture covers Morph in more detail in his post on “Powering BBC Online with nanoservices”.

At the time of writing this Morph has over 1032 services currently deployed which are powering many parts of the BBC Online, that’s 1032 potential pieces of functionality we can re-use to build Newsround, and that’s exactly what we did.

Newsround has bet big on Morph —we’ve built our entire technical stack on the foundations of reuse and we’ve seen huge benefits from this approach.

Delivering value to our audience is at the heart of our team. Morph abstracts away many aspects of a team’s day to day concerns when building a new application, things like build pipelines, tooling and scalability have been taken care of by the core Morph team — leaving product teams like Newsround to solely focus our engineering efforts on the value we can deliver the audience.

Re-use on Morph

Re-use is the foundation of Morph and it can range from HTML button components all the way up to fully featured article layouts composed of many smaller components.

Morph tenants can choose to namespace their components if they wish indicating that this component may not be much use to other teams but many components are not namespaced. Each component is versioned using semantic versioning meaning teams can submit pull request and modify these shared components without breaking anybody else’s code who may be depending on them.

Composition of components allows teams to share and combine components, APIs and features across teams, significantly reducing the time required to develop features.

For a long time the BBC has standardised its user interfaces through our Global Experience Language, otherwise known as GEL — so most user interface layouts, designs and patterns are already well established. Morph takes this one step further and commoditises the code for teams to re-use too.

As well as code reuse, Morph out the box supports build pipelines, a full CDN, routing, autoscaling and sits on a fully event driven architecture.

Challenges along the way

This way of working doesn’t come without its challenges. Morph is a single platform for every team across the BBC who wish to use it, which means at times it doesn’t always work out the box for your usecase. When this happens collaboration is key and in order to facilitate this Morph has dedicated support engineers during office hours available on Slack to support teams with their live services, a Morph community usergroup has also emerged where tenants across the platform can provide support and guidance.

Newsround has no cloud tooling of its own — we rely on the infrastructure provided by Morph which means any bespoke tooling we require such as end to end test suites and dashboards can leave us a bit stuck, again collaboration is key. We often look to our colleagues and teams across the BBC to seek solutions to these problems, often these are problems that have already been solved and are available for us to re-use as part of a shared infrastructure.

Collaboration

Collaboration is a huge part of being a tenant on a platform like Morph. Every component pushed up to the platform has the potential to be used by any team within the organisation.

Throughout development of Newsround a common question we find ourselves asking is “Can we reuse, repurpose or do we need to build from scratch?”. At the front of our development effort we consciously decide whether or not to namespace a module or leave it open for all to use. A huge part of being a tenant is as much about giving back as it is about reuse.

Clearly serverless has huge benefits to organisations, whether you decide to build your own proprietary serverless platform like the BBC and Netflix or if you decide to use a service such as AWS Lambda you’ll find that the common things become easy whilst the difficult things become possible.

Driving variance out of features means teams can really begin to hone in on what makes their products unique and focus entirely on solving the needs their users have — everything else just becomes a commodity.

Where to next?

This is only the beginning of our new Newsround transformation, keep your eyes peeled for more blog posts along the way.

Oh, and don’t forget to check https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround out!

Thanks to the entire Newsround team and everybody in the wider BBC for their support launching Newsround.

Introducing Buzz

2018-04-05T09:00:00+00:00

We've just launched CBBC Buzz - a super exciting new app for 8-12 year olds, packed full of ultra short-form content and creative challenges for kids to join in with.

Buzz is the first project to come out of a new BBC Children's strategy known as 'Kids 2020' following the biggest investment in children's content and services in a generation. Our audience is changing and a key objective of CBBC Buzz is to reach out to new users as well as satisfying our loyal CBBC fanbase.

One of the main things we’ve learned about this age group is that their likes and dislikes are as diverse as anybody else’s. Buzz recognises this by featuring the best of the BBC for kids alongside CBBC’s most loved shows. So as well as a hot new dance move to try from The Next Step or a Danger Mouse drawing challenge, you’ll also find amazing facts from The Blue Planet or a quiz about Strictly.

On top of this, our editorial team will be carefully curating the best of the internet. Social media can be full of hilarious, inspiring and important content for kids but often in a context that’s inappropriate for under 13s. By selecting some of the best bits and making them relevant to our users, we hope Buzz will feel exciting and fresh, whilst reflecting what’s happening in the real world.

As well as diverse, the content and challenges on CBBC Buzz will be plentiful and timely. We’re aiming to publish around 40 things to watch and do each day according to a schedule that’s focussed around time of day. We want Buzz to be in tune with our users’ daily lives, whether they’re in need of some post-school chill or saturday morning hype.

Our editorial strategy is ‘Love, Laugh & Learn’ and ‘Buzzers’ will find educational content delivered alongside favourite shows and funny gifs in a way that’s snackable and entertaining.

Once we identified the experience we wanted to create with Buzz, we needed to work out how to deliver it in a product that felt natural to this savvy group of digital natives. We wanted to accommodate a range of different media formats to give editors the freedom to create fast and frequent content, but we didn’t want a mismatched user interface that would result in a confusing experience. The main content feed on CBBC Buzz houses vertical, square or any shape content in a way that can be completely immersive or easily swiped through.

Users can favourite content (pretty essential when you're publishing 40 new things per day), react with a range of CBBC emojis or most importantly get involved in the action.

Buzz is a highly participatory experience and we’ve built a range of creative tools that allow users to engage with our constant stream of games and challenges. Our drawing, stickering and text tools are a great way for users to express themselves and an easy way to get involved.

Users can also take part in more adventurous challenges by uploading photos and videos. And many of these creations will end up on the CBBC channel. The Be On A Show page on our CBBC website is consistently one of our most popular webpages. With Buzz, getting on CBBC is no longer reserved for a lucky few but open to everybody, every day.

Photos and videos can be combined with text, drawings and stickers meaning the options for creative challenges are endless. We’ll soon be launching extra features such as lip sync, karaoke and overdub which will allow users to try out their dream job of football commentating or have a go at miming their own meme.

If kids (or their parents) don’t want to upload to CBBC Buzz, they can still share in the fun by using all of these tools but saving their creations to their devices to share with their friends and family offline.

We’ve taken a number of steps to create a positive community and keep kids safe when they participate with CBBC Buzz. Firstly, all users must seek permission from their parent before they can post anything to the app. Parents are then given a range of approval options which allow them to decide how involved they want to be with their child’s activity. Parents can choose to pre-approve everything their child submits (via email) or select to give more freedom over certain content types.

Every piece of user generated content is pre-moderated by a highly specialised team of moderators who are trained specifically in child safeguarding issues. The app will also contain regular updates from BBC’s Own It which empowers young people to be the boss of their online lives.

We’ve launched v1 of Buzz today but we hope we’ve built a flexible product that will allow us to change with our users on a daily basis. We’ve learned a lot about our audience but if there’s one thing our research has told us, it’s that they’ll continue to surprise us. We’re looking forward to it.

CBeebies apps team launches public beta group for Android users

2016-06-29T12:25:00+00:00

CBeebies has today launched a public beta group for Android users, inviting them to test the CBeebies Playtime Island beta. The app will launch to the public across iOS, Android and Amazon later this year. John Kearney, Senior Product Manager - Children’s Apps explains how recruiting users to join a beta group will help to ensure CBeebies makes the best possible app experiences for their audience.

Later this year, we will be launching a new app, CBeebies Playtime Island on iOS, Android and Amazon. The app will feature brand new games, including popular characters from a whole host of CBeebies shows.

As product manager for a portfolio of the BBC’s apps for children, my job is to work in partnership with BBC Children’s to make the best possible apps for our audiences. We use existing product data along with research about our audiences and future trends to inform how we shape new features, make commissioning decisions, and develop new products.

Today, we’re really pleased to announce that we’re launching our CBeebies Playtime Island beta app, initially on the Android platform. We believe this will help BBC Children’s make the best possible app experiences.

The BBC has always worked closely with its audience to help it make better products, content and technology. The availability of beta platforms, now means we can learn about our audience’s expectations at scale, building on our relationship with parents and children, to help us make better products for all. We want to hear what our users think; what works, what doesn’t, what’s great and what might be missing.

Our short-term aim is to get feedback from parents on the general performance of our app on the Android platform. The app caches HTML5 games on the device, and plays them out in a webview powered by 3rd party Crosswalk libraries, developed by Intel.

By integrating Crosswalk libraries we’re able to provide experiences for many CBeebies users who aren’t using the latest operating systems (Marshmallow or Lollipop). Typically on older operating systems, HTML5 game performance in the webview is unstable, and by integrating Intel’s Crosswalk libraries for version 4.4 KitKat and above, we can better reach our audience on Google Play and Amazon Kindle stores.

We’ve found the performance to be impressive across our testing coverage, but we’re keen to verify the implementation on this platform at greater scale with our beta users.

On the iOS platform, we have the same technical approach, but a different implementation. The majority of users are running iOS8 and above, we utilise Apple’s WKWebView, the performance is stable, but we will need to review the performance on iOS10 later in the year.

The beta app contains two games, Furchester Food, and Peter Rabbit Hop To It. Both games have performed extremely well for CBeebies on the website, and we’re keen to test our assumption that successful web games can serve our audience needs in the app space.

Beta group users can feed back to the product team directly by pressing the feedback button. This launches a parental safety lock, and once completed, the user is prompted to open their email client, to contact the product team. The app also contains the same data analysis packages as our live products (which users can turn off at any time).

As the sample size of our beta group increases, our intention is for the group to become a destination where suppliers commissioned to produce games can test their in-development games with real users.

We want to empower game producers to the make best possible experiences for our apps, and we believe this could be achieved by offering a feedback loop from a large number of users playing the in-development game in their own homes, on their own devices.

On our roadmap for CBeebies Playtime Island, we will be introducing features which we hope will make the experience more fun and rewarding - including avatars, rewards for progress, and the ability to download new games into the app.

We could test these features out using multivariate testing in the live app but this makes it hard for us to explain exactly what’s in our app. It would also be possible that two children living in the same house could get quite different sets of features - and that would be confusing.

It’s really important however that we find ways of measuring the impact of features in our development cycles, and the beta group is a more appropriate place to do this as we’ll be able to explain to the parent what’s different and why.

So to sum up, we believe our public beta group will play a vital role in helping BBC Children’s deliver better products for our audience by:

● building closer relationships with our audience

● enabling game producers to deliver their best work ever

● helping BBC Childrens only invest in features that deliver real value

Ultimately, we believe this approach will help improve the way millions of parents and children in the UK will be able to enjoy fun experiences from the BBC that keep them coming back again and again.

If you’re interesting in joining the CBeebies beta group, or would simply like to find out more, visit our FAQs

Introducing BBC iPlayer Kids

2016-04-12T09:00:00+00:00

Children have been big users of BBC iPlayer ever since it launched and the first child-friendly version of iPlayer was released way back in December 2008. Fast forward seven years and BBC iPlayer is available on over 10,000 devices, the BBC iPlayer app has been downloaded 38 million times and a third of the 2.9 billion iPlayer TV programme requests in 2015 were for Children’s programmes, more than half of which were from a tablet or mobile device. Head of iPlayer Dan Taylor-Watt now describes the launch of a new iPlayer app, aimed specifically at children.

We knew from research and from developing the BBC iPlayer website for children that parents really value having a version of iPlayer that’s guaranteed to be free of programming aimed at adults and that kids love a version of iPlayer that’s designed specially with them in mind. We also knew that parents and kids alike wanted the great features of the BBC iPlayer mobile app in a child-friendly environment - features like downloads, the saviour of many a long car journey.

Rather than create separate BBC iPlayer apps for CBeebies (which is aimed at children aged 0-6) and CBBC (which is aimed at 6-12 year olds), we decided to create a single app that enables kids to tell the app their age and instantly be presented with content curated specially for their age group. So 6 year olds are able to enjoy a mix of CBeebies and CBBC programmes without having to switch between two different apps.

With support for up to four profiles, we’ve made it easy for siblings to use the app on a shared device, entering their name and picking a character to denote their profile.

In addition to the profile switcher and the age-curated home screen, there’s a Shows area with full A-Z lists of all CBeebies and CBBC programmes available to watch (1,700+ episodes at the time of writing).

And the all-important Downloads area, providing easy access to programmes downloaded to watch offline.

There’s also a search option for kids who know exactly what they’re looking for, which automatically filters out CBBC programmes for children under 5.

We’ve also invested in making BBC iPlayer Kids accessible, with universal subtitles and a new toggle on the episode page to make it easy to switch to and from signed and audio described versions where available.

As all programmes in BBC iPlayer Kids are suitable for children, there’s no need for a Parental Guidance Lock as found on grown-up BBC iPlayer, however all app Settings (e.g. disabling downloads, enabling higher quality downloads) and links out of the app, are tucked away behind a Safety Lock.

We’ve got lots more planned for the BBC iPlayer Kids app but couldn’t wait any longer to share it and start hearing your feedback.

BBC iPlayer Kids is available to download now for phones and tablets from the Amazon, Apple and Google Play app stores.

Going for Gold with Pudsey’s Gigantic Game

2015-10-29T15:43:00+00:00

The BBC and Children in Need have today launched Pudsey’s Gigantic Game, where the famous teddy bear takes a starring role as audiences are given the ability to create their own compelling levels for one gigantic game that everyone can play. Executive Product Manager, Digital Creativity Jon Howard explains more about how the game works and thinking behind the tech.

Children in Need's famous teddy bear stars in his own game

Empowering young people to be creative is a potent way to grow their confidence in digital skills. Expressing themselves and showing off their capabilities helps to foster an understanding of what digital can do. Here we are using games as the medium as they are a great catalyst for introducing concepts of conditional logic, visual design and product development.

Users quickly understand that a game needs obstacles and puzzles to interest its players – and developing these challenges requires deeper thought on how they will be approached and perceived. This engagement is fun and feels more like play than learning.

Pudsey’s Gigantic Game uses a simple drag and drop interface which enables users to immediately create levels in styles ranging from platformers to flying games and in locations from underwater to outer space. Our hero Pudsey can be driving his car, donning his cape or even bouncing around the world on a pogo stick.

Preset templates allow users to jump straight into level building, engaging their digital creativity to produce game levels that will challenge and entertain. Each played level can be remixed too, this allows players to see how it has been constructed and use it as a template for their own creation.

Preset templates allow users to jump straight into level building

Gigantic Game uses a component based system. Capabilities have been wrapped up in components to abstract the complexity, simplifying the cognitive ask of users while allowing useful preset configurations to be applied very easily. For example, items within a game level can have physical properties applied by simply telling them to be ‘stuck’ (not moving), ‘floating’ (able to fly) or ‘bouncy’ (no explanation required). This simplification still allows for an amazing variety of combinations and output.

Each level of the game has a variety of combinations and output

Players begin each level and need to jump, fly, dive or drive to an exit to get to the next one, collecting coins and treasure along the way. Some levels take seconds to complete, others require much longer to puzzle out; it all depends on the game design skills of the user who created the level. Don’t worry about levels that are impossible to complete as in order to to submit one each user must first complete it. Each submitted level will be pre-moderated before being added to the game and players are able to report a level if they find an issue. For players the objective is to complete as many levels as possible while racking up a really high score. How many levels can you complete?

A ‘totaliser’ keeps track of how many levels the game has. In the lead up to Children in Need's big night we want to make the game as Gigantic as possible. A series of stretch targets will form community challenges. Objective number 1 is 500 levels.

The game will hopefully get bigger and bigger in the run-up to Children in Need

Pudsey’s Gigantic Game is the next release for the BBC’s mixital technology following on from the massive successes of Make It: Technobabble Game Maker on CBBC and the recent Doctor Who Game Maker. Storytelling and music visualisation tools have also branched from the system, delivering creative experiences for young people on the mixital site. In total, over 300,000 users have made the transition from consumer into creator! It is great to be able to iterate our maker kits, adding features and improving usability with every step and allowing more and more audiences to get creative with BBC brands.

Launched as part of the BBC’s Make It Digital season, the Gigantic Game was produced as a collaboration between BBC Children in Need, BBC Digital Creativity and Aardman Digital.

Pudsey’s Gigantic Game is a really exciting enterprise. We are encouraging users to get creative with digital technology and introducing them to game design – a fantastic start to their journey in digital creativity. Users will be able to create at the speed of thought, to tell stories, create adventures and share them with their friends and the world. I can’t wait to see what they come up with. Try for yourself. Play, create and share with Pudsey’s Gigantic Game.

CBeebies Storytime app: Downloadable library gives more choice to kids and parents

2015-07-02T10:20:25+00:00

In July 2014 we released CBeebies Storytime - the interactive storybook app designed to help children and grown-ups enjoy stories together, which was developed entirely in-house here at BBC Children’s. I put together a blog post all about how we built the app, which can be read here.

Enhancing Storytime

Since it’s release, the original version of Storytime has been downloaded over a million times across iOS, Android and Kindle, and has been used to read millions of stories to some of the youngest members of our audience. The success of Storytime has been great to see; however the approach we took with the original release did come with a few areas we wanted to improve and build upon.

Firstly, while it offered a good range of stories to suit many tastes and reading levels, the content was all built into the app itself, meaning it was a little difficult to add new content - we put out a 1.1 release containing two new stories, but this was still a ‘new’ download of the whole app.

Secondly, because the app had all of its stories built-in, it became fairly large in terms of file size. Finally, we also wanted to greatly enhance the accessibility of the app to users with visual and motor impairments, so we could make Storytime available to as many members of the CBeebies audience as possible.

Introducing Downloads

With these concerns in mind, we set to developing version 2.0 almost immediately following the original release, and it's a radically enhanced experience: instead of a single large app containing a set number of stories, the new version of Storytime is a small app that allows users to download new stories from the internet (more on how this works below).

The main advantage of this new approach is that the user now has the ability to essentially curate their own content in Storytime. Where previously the user would be potentially stuck with stories they had no interest in, they can now choose to delete any unwanted stories and replace them with new ones.

Once downloaded, the user can keep the stories indefinitely, or until they choose to replace them with new ones. The book has a total of 12 available story ‘slots’ in the book, mostly to avoid performance and memory issues. It’s possible in the future that we can raise this cap too.

The second big win with this approach is that CBeebies now has the ability to continually add new content to the Storytime virtual library - no app updates are required for the user, as we’re now in a position where we can simply add new stories to the remote library at any point and make them available for download. This is a huge change for Storytime: it’s gone from being a single app, to a flexible and future-proof platform.

As with the original release, Storytime’s design was handled entirely in-house, which allowed the UX team to really get under the skin of solving how we’d present this new system to our users. At its core, the system simply had to present a list of stories to the user, allow them to download one onto their device, and delete it. However within this seemingly simple requirement there was a wealth of complexity that needed addressing.

Additionally, and arguably most importantly, this process had to be child-led and not controlled by the grown-up, meaning that a standard list of panels, buttons and words simply wouldn’t do the job. What the UX team came up with was an absolutely beautiful solution to presenting a list of stories.

The way it works is like this. First, a new cloud icon was added to the 3D storybook screen:

As well as a “blank” page at the end of the book too:

When the users hits either of these icons, the camera seamlessly pans up away from the book and into the sky, at which point all of the available stories are presented as playful dangly clouds:

Each cloud contains a single story, with supporting voiceovers for younger users. Pressing a cloud flips it over, and shows some description about the story, along with a single big “download” call to action:

When the user hits the button, the story is downloaded to the device, with progress shown in a colourful rainbow preloader:

Once the download is complete, the rainbow disappears and the cloud descends back down into the book, which is automatically flipped to a blank page. The cloud then “rains” the story into the book...

…and the story grows out of the page and becomes part of the book:

Magic!

From this point, the story is permanently installed in the book, and can be taken away and read offline. There is also a large amount of edge-case handling built into this process too: as children control it, we need to ensure that errors are handled well, and information is communicated back to the user in simple clear terms. We also had to factor in the portability of the app, and its potential use cases: for example, users cannot delete stories from the device if they have no internet connection, to prevent scenarios where a child may delete content and then be unable to download it again.

The .story Format

Re-architecting Storytime to support this functionality was surprisingly complex: the player and much of the 3D book front-end needed to be changed so that new content would work within it. The key to this was understanding how stories needed to be stored and served to the app - we need something that would allow us to wrap up everything that makes a complete story, so it could be stored and maintained online safely, and consumed robustly by the new Storytime app. After some lengthy technical investigation, we created a dedicated “.story” file format especially for the app.

The .story format is actually just an uncompressed ZIP file, with a customised extension for ease of search, and a very tightly defined content structure. Compressed ZIP files take some time to work with on devices, and didn’t offer us a significant file size saving in most cases, so we opted for uncompressed files (typically a complete story takes up between 15-25MB including all audio and 3D textures). The contents of the file are structured extremely strictly, so that we can ensure our external creatives (who actually create the content) can work within a consistent framework, and build structurally consistent and testable stories - even if the story content itself varies wildly.

So now we have our app, and we know what our stories look like: the final piece of the puzzle was to change how our content pipeline worked. For the first version, creating and releasing content was an entirely developer-led process. A third party built the stories, which were then signed off by the team here. Our development team would then integrate the stories into the app, and handle the app release process. For the new version of Storytime however, this process had to be radically reworked - this version is designed to be installed once and then have content continuously pushed out to it. Therefore, this process had to be usable by none-technical staff, for example our editorial colleagues, or a project manager on the team.

This was achieved in a number of ways. The stories themselves are served from an Amazon S3 instance, which is in turn sat behind the Children’s Binary Store front end. This allows none-developers to create and manage files on S3 with a straightforward toolset. On top of this, we have a number of validation steps that cover both the remote data, and also things as fine-grained as building the story assets themselves.

For example, we use an automated build process to take our story assets and compile them into the finished .story binary - this process doesn’t physically complete if errors are found, meaning that it’s much more difficult for someone none-technical to make mistakes during the build phase. The story list for the library is also validated, meaning that if an error is introduced (say for example, if a story listing is accidentally duplicated), the error will never get close to live.

As well as broad content validation, we also do some very fine-grained checks on the assets to ensure that they are valid on mobile platforms. The biggest of these is to ensure that there is no code present in any of the SWF assets that make up our stories – this is prohibited by the iOS app store for security reasons, and will cause an instant app rejection, so we’ve taken this validation stage very seriously! To accomplish this, we’ve leveraged an AIR SDK tool that will confirm very clearly if the SWF’s are “clean” of code or not – something as small as a single “stop()” action anywhere in any single asset will cause a rejection flag, so this tool allows us to say with absolute certainty that the assets are OK to go up. In fact, this check is so tightly coupled with the process that constructs our .story files that we’re unable to build an actual story if any code is present, as we’ve set it to halt the build and throw and error if any is found.

Accessibility Enhancements

The final major enhancement we’ve added to Storytime is vastly increased accessibility options. Both iOS and Android have a number of excellent native accessibility features that allow users with visual or physical impairment to interact with their devices. Notably, these include robust text-to-speech options, and things like single switch control methods and touch-explore options. However, one of the major drawbacks of sandboxed technologies like AIR and Unity is that their contents can’t be indexed in the same way that a native app can be, so for example the device isn’t able to see our “read to me” button and so cannot read it out.

Our solution for this was to mimic quite closely the same functionality within Storytime itself. We added a togglable “auto scan” mode, in which the app is fully navigable with a single press on the screen using configurable timed item scans. This mode also features optional voice-over on all buttons, screens and interactions, meaning every part of the experience can be accessed.

This functionality may even be able to be leveraged by things like external switches in the future. As well as being manually controllable from the Grown-ups menu, we also hook into the native accessibility features of the device too – if the user has any native features turned on, we’re able to detect this and handle their route through the app appropriately.

Storytime also continually monitors for changes in the accessibility features on the device, so it can handle common scenarios like triple-click shortcuts, which are used to quickly enable and disable features on the device.

The end result of these sweeping enhancements is something we’re very proud of – Storytime 2.0 is now finally a robust future-proof platform that users can keep coming back to again and again, and we’re able to keep our content fresh, exciting and fun without users needing to constantly update their apps.

CBeebies Storytime is out now for iOS, Android and Kindle.