Filled with great games designed to aid child development and allow our young children to learn through play, the CBeebies Playtime App has reached 3 million downloads since its launch one year ago.

The latest update sees things get a little furry. 

You may have heard that CBeebies and Sesame Workshop joined forces to produce ‘The Furchester Hotel’ - a children’s show set in an ‘almost’ world-class hotel run by a furry family of cheerful monsters. Chaos ensues, as you’d expect. Furchester introduces brand new characters, welcoming the beloved Elmo and Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. Coinciding with the show’s premiere this September, the CBeebies Playtime app launches a brand new Furchester Hotel Game in its latest update. 

App users can explore the hotel and solve some monster problems, like making music for Elmo to dance to, or helping Furgus to drain a flooded room of water. There are different ways to solve each problem - even the silliest ideas might work.

To mirror the TV show, CBeebies Playtime’s Furchester Hotel game promotes and builds on open-ended problem-solving skills too. It focusses on the idea that there can be more than one way to solve a problem - encouraging the player to experiment with potential solutions, and even make mistakes in the pursuit of finding an answer. Whenever possible we’ve used playful animations for incorrect answers so the child doesn’t feel prohibited to take risks. 

Each problem is fun-filled, and calls upon intuitive app features. Shake your device like a snow globe to create a blizzard for the Penguin Bobsled Team, or sing to Elmo and give him something to dance to. These features provide lots of opportunities for fun and engagement and are designed to encourage the little ones to play them again and again. We really hope they will love it.

That’s not all. The Furchester family are not the only ones to check into the CBeebies app.

• New Alphablocks words: The Alphablocks ‘Word Magic’ game helps support the development of early year phonics skills. This update features a completely new set of words for kids to have fun making and reading. It also includes an added element giving children the chance to help the Alphablocks use their new word in a sentence too.
• New Octonauts missions: Kids can expand their Octonaut Cadet Training with four brand new missions, guided by Kwazii and Pesco, exploring the ocean floor helping to rescue and protect creatures in need of help, including helping to clean a shark’s teeth.
• New features to the Andy’s Dinosaur Adventure game:  We have squeezed even more into the Andy’s Dinosaur Adventure game with two brand new features: play ‘fetch’ with their dinosaurs; and help Andy to keep the dinosaurs clean with a swipe action on their device creating soapy bubbles.

 

The CBeebies app has been played over 15 million times at an average of 9 minutes each time over the last three months… That’s a total of over 135 million minutes of CBeebies Playtime fun enjoyed by little ones across the UK. We understand summer is always a great time to be out and about, and family trips sometimes involve long car journeys. So we’re hoping we’ve managed to keep CBeebies fans entertained as they have been on the go this summer, with over 11 million app plays across July and August alone.  

Over the next few months we’ll be working hard to add a very special surprise into the Playtime app, for little ones to get ready and countdown to Christmas.

And for you grown-ups… many of you have told us what you and your little ones love about the app, what their favourite game is and what you’d like more of. We really appreciate that feedback, so thanks for letting us know. We’re always interested in your suggestions and ideas. Please do leave a comment below.

Lucy Beckett is Content Producer, Children's.

• The Furchester Hotel starts on CBeebies on Friday 26 September at 5pm.
• Read a Q&A with the Furchesters and the performers on the CBeebies Grown-Ups blog.
  
• Read more about CBeebies activities online on the Internet blog.

Jack Nicholson lights a cigarette and the first post of the Arena Gazette is published. It’s 1980 and Nicholson takes a long walk down a series of corridors strewn with camera equipment. He passes Stanley Kubrick, enters a bedroom, grabs an axe from the bed and works himself up into a frenzy. 33 years later in 2013, Stephen King is on BBC Breakfast talking to Will Gompertz about his recently published sequel to The Shining and how he disliked Kubrick’s interpretation of the original.

Hardly a day goes by without there being a story in the news that relates to a story from the Arena archive. On Friday 20^th September it was Stephen King promoting his latest book, in the following weeks it has been the death of Carolyn Cassady, the privatisation of the Royal Mail, the Edward Snowden spy leaks and Alex Ferguson’s memoirs. For these news item there have been rare interviews and moments from the archive that provide a unique perspective to the story, such as interviews with Carolyn Cassady in 1988 on her love for both Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, Alex Ferguson in 1997 recalling the inspiration of his mentor Jock Stein, the film-makers from the Post Office Film Unit discussing in 1983 how they made their masterpiece The Night Mail and Kim Philby, former head of MI6, recounting in 1993 how he had recruited the author, Graham Greene, for the Secret Service.

The Arena archive, encompassing around 600 films, is a one-off record of the cultural life of the planet over the last 75 years. The Gazette is fed from this archive, bringing the past into the present into the future - that’s become our motto for Arena Online. The Gazette repositions the stories from their original context into today’s rolling news agenda.

Until recently it would have been fair to regard archive as primarily a record of past phenomena of use for historical research or the illustration of those phenomena. In this case it carried a halo of academe. The concomitant is to see archive as a ready source of nostalgia comfortable or uncomfortable, the provenance not only of the past but of those who live in it. Either view suggests images of piles of dusty, forgotten cans and tapes with the musty ambience of a bygone age.

But the notion of archive and our relation to it is changing rapidly. Anthony Wall, Arena series editor, outlined why in a document who wrote early on in Arena Online’s life:

“With the multiplicity of contemporary media and its ever more various capacity not only to capture but to record, transmit and cross refer material, the opportunity is here to reinterpret the very meaning of ‘archive’ and put it at the centre of a new kind of creative endeavour.

There are virtually no people in the UK at least below the age of 50, who do not have a comprehensive experience of life recorded in moving word and image, ubiquitously available through the television. There is no-one in the UK who has not been exposed to that experience at least through radio and cinema.

The result is a sensibility without precedent in recorded human history. The possibility exists of making film, out of archive (in its broadest sense), that would provide an experience of time travel through one’s own life and times, and the lives and times of others.

With the ready availability of camera phones etc. on which anyone can record their lives it goes so far as to disrupt any supplier/viewer relationships. The distinction between the two is no longer a reliable index. It’s now feasible to go beyond Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, life on screen is now virtually a matter of course.

I believe the amalgamation of these propositions provides the ground framework for a new kind of creative endeavour in which archive will be the raw material. And is the term archive any longer adequate to describe what it has become?” 

Our most ambitious venture to date seeks to create a new virtual world constructed exclusively and uniquely from the Arena archive. Its ambition is to reimagine the characters and moments that have informed the cultures of the last century as residents in a virtual hotel. The Arena Hotel substitutes the conventional categories of artistic and cultural aesthetics - music, film, politics, literature etc. with the peculiar (and equally rigid) codes of the ‘hotel’ with its bars, dining facilities, spa complex, ballrooms and nightclubs. So William Burroughs finds himself in the tearoom alongside Ozzy Osbourne and the creators of Spitting Image, Fluck and Law. Anita Ekberg, Robert Crumb and Pavarotti, in their unique way, relax in the spa and the ballroom is filled with the ANC party of 1994, the George Formby Appreciation Society and the entire town of Luckenbach, Texas.

The experience is informed by graphic adventure games (Myst in particular) which enables each visitor’s experience to differ from one another depending on the floors and characters they come across. The ambition is to develop the Hotel with an even greater array of facilities and accommodate more guests and their stories. The result we hope will be to inform, educate and entertain in a virtual world. Above all we want it to be fun, so we invite you to log on, check in and enjoy the five star facilities.

Coming up we have a films featuring 50 years of the National Theatre, Spitting Image, Martin Scorsese on the New York Review Of Books and American Epic, a the 3 part film about how US roots music came to be recorded and changed the course of history.

The Arena Hotel is a resting place for rare individuals.

The Arena Team:

 

• Anthony Wall – Series Editor
• Alex Jones – Online producer
• James Leeds – Software Developer
• Issabelle Goodrich – Researcher
• Andrew Wright – Archive Producer
• Guro Eide – Production Manager

 

 

Alex Jones is Online Producer, Arena.

 

• For more information and to accept clips visit the Arena website. 
• The Gazette – Arena Online’s new blog – is updated regularly.
• The first episode of a two-part documentary Arena: The National Theatre will be broadcast on BBC Four at 9pm on Thursday 24 October.
• Watch uncut anecdotes from actors who feature in the documentary.
• Follow @BBC_Arena on twitter.

Try Being Me is the result of that challenge. We are not attempting to provide a literal portrayal of how the dyslexic mind functions nor are we trying to create a comprehensive website on the subject.  As a companion to the broadcast special, the role of the interactive experience is to enhance our audience’s understanding of the dilemmas and coping mechanisms described by the children featured in the special, living day to day with dyslexia. We meet Ben, Khalaya, Zach and, uniquely online, Rebekah.

Online producer Nikki Stearman worked with the Newsround production team to select moments from interviews with each child where they described how they visualized their daily challenges. For example, Zach sees his brain as being differently wired, and that makes it hard for him to picture letters in sequence. Rebekah invents mnemonic images that remind her how to spell tricky words.  She uses the example “Hairy Astronaut Likes Fish” to remember the word “half”.

Nikki and project manager Vicki Neal worked with Sheffield based agency The Workshop to develop individual games and animations to illustrate each child’s thoughts. As the user plays the games, the challenges get harder, more pressured and increasingly frustrating. In-game messages encourage the user to connect what they are feeling as they play, to the simple everyday acts of spelling a word or remembering a list of things to do. If a player chooses to quit a challenge, they can, but they’ll be reminded that, “if you have dyslexia, you can’t give up”. For us, Try Being Me for My Dyslexic Mind is just the start. If it works, we plan to apply this approach to new subjects in the year ahead, always looking for new ways to inspire our audience.

It’s inspiring to me that so much of our audience comes to Newsround week in and week out, whether to feed their curiosity and thirst for knowledge, or just to get their homework done. We all need a little help sometimes. And help begins with understanding. If Try Being Me succeeds in helping even one of our audience better understand how it feels to be living with dyslexia, and better understand a friend or classmate as a result, then that’s a great start. As I said, you reach millions, one child at a time.

The Newsround special My Dyslexic Mind Newsround Special broadcasts on the CBBC Channel on January 7th at 5pm.

Try out the Try Being Me interactive experience on the CBBC website. 

 

In my role as General Manager for News & Knowledge at BBC Future Media, I oversee eight of the 10 major areas (we call these 'products') of BBC Online working with my editorial counterparts - including the BBC homepage. Today, we relaunched the homepage in a test ('beta') version for public use and feedback. The new page is accessible from a link at the top of the current homepage, or directly at beta.bbc.co.uk. I hope that users who give the new homepage a go find it much improved. My colleague James Thornett has written about the relaunch in more detail over on the BBC Internet Blog and would like to know what audiences think. Please leave your feedback comments on his blog post.

As users start to use the new homepage, I wanted to explain why we've introduced changes.

In last year's Strategy Review ('Putting Quality First') we proposed a BBC Online which:

• Had half the number of top-level directories, down from the 400 we had then (i.e. /sitename)
• Cost 25% less to run (i.e. the BBC Online Service Licence for 2010/11 is £135m - we intend to cut spend to £100m)
• Sent double the traffic we did then to external websites, helping the broader UK digital economy
• Made more Nations & Regions content available
• And, critically, did 'fewer things, better'.

We're making progress in all of these areas and in January of this year, we outlined how we would address the challenge of doing more with less - importantly a move away from building websites via separate new media budgets, towards one cohesive online service with clear lines of accountability.

But this is more than just sound governance - the changes will create a more distinctive, joined-up service for licence fee-payers which is recognizably 'BBC', and greater clarity for the industry in terms of how much we'll do on the web, setting boundaries for what we will and won't do online.

We've arrived at a BBC Online service comprising ten distinct areas or 'products'. Each product is at a different stage of its life: BBC News and BBC iPlayer are both concrete propositions; others, like the fledgling BBC Knowledge & Learning product are approaching the final stages of definition. All will be built on the same shared infrastructure to allow a more seamless transition between them.

The third dimension to our strategy is to provide greater value for money for licence fee-payers, by broadening access to our products across four screens - beyond the web to mobile, tablet, and connected TV. Our BBC News product demonstrates this commitment: it's available on the web, as a mobile and tablet application, and more recently has been optimized for connected TV, launching on the Samsung Smart TV platform in June.

One service, ten products, four screens

So we summarise this strategy as: 'one service, ten products, four screens'.

The homepage occupies a unique position within BBC Online: though BBC Online is a distinct service, and the homepage a single product within it, editorially the page can show off the breadth of content we make available on the web. But showing this breadth has been our perennial challenge. To date we've made tweaks to a relatively static page to better fulfil this purpose; with the move to a new technical platform, we've had the opportunity to rebuild the page from first for the 9 million-plus average weekly unique browsers.

The new BBC homepage launched in beta today marks a departure from the way we've approached this challenge until now and introduces a new, more visual approach to showing off our content on the web, and eventually on mobile, tablet, and connected TV devices too. Other features include:

• Simple filters enabling users to tailor the page based on their interests.
• Sliding 'drawers' to reveal more or less detail from showcases of the most popular content from all of BBC Online at any time and real-time listings for BBC TV and Radio.
• At-a-glance aspects - news and sport headlines, weather forecasts with lottery and travel news updates to follow, plus traditional index-based navigation for quick look-up.
• In time, nations' homepages united into a single product to provide relevant local and national information based on a user's choice of location - a key 'Putting Quality First' commitment.

We believe the redesigned page makes it easier for visitors to find the content they're looking for, whilst discovering something new - I hope you agree.

Phil Fearnley is General Manager for News & Knowledge, BBC Future Media

• More about the beta release of the new BBC homepage in the press release on the BBC Press Office web site.