Technology + Creativity at the BBC Feed

You don't know what you don't know

2020-11-10T11:26:55+00:00

The story of how the Bitesize team created a quiz feature from their bedrooms, kitchens and garages.

It was the middle of summer 2020. After the whirldwind brought on by coronavirus, lockdown, working from home and not least Daily Lessons we were just settling into a comfortable routine.

And when I say ‘we’, I mean the lovely bunch of people that make up the Bitesize team these days: developers, testers, UX designer, business analysts, project and product managers.

Tickets were added in at a steady pace, features were coming along nicely. We even spent a couple of days in a hackathon devising new ideas for the website while shaking off some technical cobwebs.

Overall life working from home was as peachy as it could get in a global pandemic.

Maths, Science, Magic

We started looking ahead at what we could do to support our audiences in the new autumn term. Students faced interrupted lessons and a potential mix of in-school and at-home learning. We came up with a number of things we could offer to help. One of them was using quizzes to diagnose gaps in their knowledge and recommend where they should focus.

Quizzes are nothing new to Bitesize, we have two types of them already. One is the old favourite version made up of ten questions at the end of the revision chapters andother was a more elaborate learning experience powered by machine learning which aimed to help the user retain information.

This quiz was different!

The data science team had a prototype that used existing questions from test chapters and computed the user’s mastery level across each study guide with a certain level of confidence.

The more questions the user was asked, the higher the confidence level, and the more accurate the mastery level.

Based on those mastery levels we could suggest different topics or guides that the user should revise, effectively allowing us to diagnose a user’s gaps in knowledge.

“Trusssst in me…”(Kaa, the python — Jungle Book)

The data science team had written their prototype in Python. Within the Bitesize team we had never touched that particular gem of a programming language so we were very apprehensive at first.

However, Python is “The” language of choice for machine learning and data science in general, not least because two of the most powerful libraries for mathematical operations are using it: numpy and scipy.

Those two libraries featured heavily in the prototype presented to us, so it made perfect sense for us to try and use Python for the actual implementation. However it did mean we had to produce a whole new CI/CD pipeline for it to work.

It’s a long way to Live if you wanna rock ’n roll

Having a fantastically clever algorithm that can provide mastery and confidence scores is great!

Shaping it into a product that provides value to our users is a whole different proposition.

Some of the initial questions we had to answer were:

How should we package algorithm in order to be hosted in our AWS VPC?
What’s the algorithm’s domain and data contract?
How do we explain the algorithm to our audiences? Understandibly, these days people can be very suspicious of software that uses data to provide information.
And last but not least, what happens when there is a Live bug? Contrary to popular belief software will always have bugs. Our job is to ensure they are few and far between.

A few shaping and discovery sessions with the data services team led to refactoring the prototype to a new working model.

We started calling it the Efficient Learning algorithm or just “the algorithm”.

Its domain seemed to be made up of questions and answers. It required knowledge of Bitesize curriculum domain made up of subjects, topics and study guides. For example it needed to know that the topic Cell Biology contains guides like Cell Structure, Cell Division etc.

The results returned would be an array of guides with mastery and confidence scores for each one.

While our understanding of the Maths behind the scenes was not that great, hence the “Mystery Box”, we knew enough in order to get started on building the infrastructure for this and the UI.

To Lambda or not to Lambda

One of the early decisions made about the this new quiz was to host the algorithm as a lambda.

Some very good reasons for that were that the algorithm looked to be a data in/out function which did not need to store the results or any user data. Therefore, we did not need a permanent running EC2 for this. It could be packaged in a lambda that spun up, computed results, then shut down.

In addition, the “algorithm” did not need access to any of our systems except perhaps the curriculum data. Since the data required about subjects, topics, study guides was static we could just add it to one of our S3 buckets.

Lambdas are a lot easier to develop, wonderfully encapsulated, easy to spin up and tear down. Plus we already had a few kicking about our estate and we felt confident we could do this fast.

A Matter of State

Choosing to create a lambda implied that something else would have to handle the state. The “state” in our case consisted of a list of questions sent to the algorithm with a flag for whether the answer was right or wrong.

Initial UI drafts suggested that the quiz would run one question at a time and required the ability to store the user’s progress. We did not need any personal user data for this which suited us just fine because we wanted the quiz to be available to non-signed in users.

This is where User Store was the right solution for us. It is currently a client side module which handles CRUD operations for key-value data using the local storage API. The ambition for the future is to update the component to use a more permanent cloud storage solution whilst hiding the complexities away from the UI.

For the quizzes MVP we use it to store the questions which have already been answered. We could later extend this to securely store achievements and progress for signed in users.

UI and the MVP approach

The MVP planning sessions with the teams are always fun!

They involve creative discussions about what the core functionality should be. Then we look at the time we have to build it and start trimming the edges.

The MVP approach allows the whole team to build this product as fast as possible, then learn what works for the audience, and what doesn’t.
UX designers also changed their approach. Instead of carrying on a big discovery phase with lots of user studies, they switched to a ‘build, measure, learn’ one.

The UI focused on getting the user to results as fast possible with minimal onboarding. It had to cater for questions and answers with very different text sizes.

It needed to be friendly to smaller devices since it was estimated that most students will be doing their studying on tablets or phones.

The UI also challenged us to think of the way we can display results meaningful to a user.

Mastery scores are not extremely useful. We needed a system that can explain how well a student has done for each topic they chose.
In order to help with this, the data science team expanded the algorithm to return band 1, 2 or 3 for each study guide with band 3 being the highest mastery level.

To simplify results even further, we created band 1, 2 and 3 for the whole topic based on the scores of each study guide.

The bands map to a colour system of Red, Orange, Green:

The most useful part for the user is the study suggestions provided for each topic. For Red and Orange bands we display links to the study guides with the lowest mastery scores. This should direct our users to content that is highly relevant to their revision goals.

Infrastructure

Getting a Python lambda off the ground was not trivial!

At first we had to setup a local development environment to run the function locally. We used Python 3 virtualenv and AWS SAM which enabled us to test the function with different types of events.

Our CI/CD pipelines are mostly done via Jenkins and Cosmos. Cosmos is an internal tool that provides a GUI for managing CloudFormation stacks. We created a pipeline that spun up a Docker container from a Python 3 image. The pipeline copied the code, ran the unit tests and packaged the build and dependencies into a zip file. From there it was a simple step to publish it to our AWS VPC.

Cosmos uses AWS CLI behind the scenes, so the size of the package when uploading a lambda is set to no more than 50 MB. However, when creating the package we quickly discovered that numpy and scipy libraries in the dependencies pushed the size of the package over that threshold.

This is where AWS Layers were helpful. The Layers functionality in AWS allowed us to move these two runtime dependencies outside the function. AWS offers an out of the box layer for the two libraries so we did not need to create one ourselves.

Automate all the things!

Between our development teams, our testers are spread thinner than marmite on toast. So our plans to secretly make them GCSE experts by getting them to manually test the quiz over and over again seemed unlikely.

We came to the conclusion that we had created a very challenging system to test.

The algorithm was not deterministic. It would not be possible to force it to provide the same questions with the same input. Luckily it provided the same mastery results if the same questions were used.

The UI was intricate, worked fully client side and the quiz was 20 questions long. So manual testing would be long, boring and repetitive. Exactly the opposite of what we want our testers to do!

The test team built two sets of automated tests in Cypress. One set runs contract tests against the responses coming from the API Gateway. The other runs an end to end test of the UI and can run through the whole quiz interface as many times as it is needed.

Creating and updating automated tests has become part of the regular development process and as a result it has given us a lot of confidence in our features over the past year. Automated tests run across the whole estate on an hourly basis and flag breaking changes.

This means we can deploy to Live faster, catch problems early and we are not restricted by the number of testers in our team.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know … Until you know it!

Hopefully Bitesize quizzes will help you figure out what you don’t know. Well, at least as far as GCSE’s go.

We had a great time making this and look forward to adding more subjects and introducing new types of questions.

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).

20th anniversary of BBC Bitesize

2018-09-04T11:55:15+00:00

Bitesize is the BBC’s Educational resource for school-age students across the whole of the UK, and turns 20 this month. We brought the site up-to-date with a new look and a suite of personalisation features.

1998

1998 is a fascinating year from a technology point of view. It was in 1998 we saw great strides in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision with the launch of the scarily life-like Furby. A company called Google was founded to help you find out more about your favourite Backstreet Boy or what time Lethal Weapon 4 was on at the cinema. Oh and the first pop-group with a wildcard in their name stormed the charts with a song called “C’est la Vie”. What a time to be alive!

In order for the BBC to keep up with such revolutionary innovations, it also had to change, and did so by looking to the web, launching its very first online-first product — BBC Bitesize.

This week sees the launch of a not only a brand-new look and feel for Bitesize, but a personalised resource for students of all ages. Getting here wasn’t just rebadging the Mini Metro, it was our biggest engineering undertaking to date.

Paint it orange

Our in-house UX team worked with creative agency Rufus Leonard to devise a system in which our brand could be consistent yet change with our users. We were extremely pleased with the result — consistent typography and structure across the site, but iconography and colours that change depending on the age of the user (brighter oranges and yellows for primary students, muted purples for those revising for their exams.

This new unified front-end experience addressed a source of frustration with both our users and developers. Different parts of Bitesize looked dramatically different from each other. And that’s because technically they were — monolithic PHP applications serving different types of pages. The pages for Primary kids were served from one app, Secondary another.

Mighty Morphin Nanoservices

Our first step into breaking the monoliths came from the development of Morph, an internal project created by BBC Sport. You can read more about Morph in this post by Matthew Clark, but the key idea is that Morph allows you to build sites around “nanoservices”. A nanoservice is an “independent component that does one job well”. So, for example, the navigation component on Bitesize is a nanoservice. This component is responsible for fetching only the data required to display the correct links to the user. This nanoservice’s data is accessible via a url in which in turn another service can use to construct the HTML/CSS/JS to use. We can easily put together an entire page this way.

Being forced to develop to the principle of single responsibility is a great way to stop code bloat and make sure that all modules are reusable with minimal duplication. We follow this principle all the way from our front to back-end with a system we call “Blocks”. Blocks is a combination of iSite (our CMS), React, and Morph. Individual pieces of content are created in distinct chunks — a text block, a video block, etc. Each of these are nanoservices which are requested by the containing webpage and then curated into an article. This has the immense benefit of being able to develop and deploy individual pieces of the site independently of each other — a fantastic benefit when working in a large cross-location team.

Font

Typography-nerds will have heard about the introduction of Reith — the BBC’s new typeface. The rebrand was the perfect opportunity to apply it to the whole of Bitesize, but in all honesty, the idea of not only releasing an entire new look and feel of the site in one go, but updating the font at the same time scared the bananas out of us.

Release what you can

Not wanting to be left with no bananas, we decided on a phased approach. One that could still allow the brand to be revealed with a bang instead of silently mutating the site slowly over time. Phase 1 would be aspects of the site we could release to the audience now without being considered unique to the brand. So we switched the font to Reith across the site without fuss. We also refactored our page header into a single reusable component as well as other small improvements. All things that were needed to be done for the rebrand, but instead were now live to the audience, and therefore shrinking the size of the “big reveal” down to a more manageable task. Captain Risk is wounded -6 HP.

Flag it

“The best code is the code you have with you”. “If code’s not live then it doesn’t exist”. There’s probably a good saying in there somewhere. What I’m trying to say is that on launch day, how do you know everything is going to work? The answer is because it actually went live a week ago.
Every single feature we developed for the new brand was hidden behind a feature flag. Our code would check whether a certain query string was passed via the page url and display the new brand to the user accordingly. This meant we could continue our practice of Continuous Deployment without disturbing users with flashes of odd colours or broken pages. It also meant that we could run our suite of automated tests with each release.

Having our rebranded site live but hidden meant developers could work closely with the UX team to see how the new designs were shaping up on the live site with real content. This provided a tight feedback-loop, allowing us to continually tweak and deploy new versions.

Hello American Investors

Hover over the new Bitesize logo and you’ll see it come to life! (well, move around a bit). No, it’s not an animated gif or video. It’s actually one single png sprite animated like a flick-book. I first saw this effect being used for this fantastic animated Google Doodle. This technique proved the best trade-off between file-size and performance while still looking great.

You also may have noticed what we call “sparks”, the little background shapes that float in the background. These are a collection of svgs randomly placed using a JavaScript module we created called Mr. Sparkle. Because we arrange these sparks client-side, it means every single page is different — a great way of confusing the screenshot comparison tool we use for testing.

You can read more about the design process on the BBC’s GEL blog.

My Bitesize

Modernising the visual aspect of Bitesize would be frivolous if we didn’t also modernise the experience of our users. With the launch of My Bitesize, users can save Revision Guides for later and continue where they left-off. Powered by the BBC’s single login system, BBC Account, Bitesize will continue to become more personalised, tailoring its experience to the user whether they’re studying at home on the web, or wherever they are with our updated Android and iOS apps.

We love the new design and features and hope you do too.
To another 20 years 🥂.

BBC Ideas: Three months in

2018-04-25T12:30:00+00:00

It’s been just over three months since BBC Ideas went live, and after the white heat of the launch period Executive Editor Bethan Jinkinson shares three things she has learnt over the past few weeks.

1. There’s a clear audience appetite for informative short-form factual digital video. Despite all the audience research and preparation we’d done, when we first launched we weren’t entirely sure there would be a market for our eclectic mix of short-form video spanning genres across philosophy, ethics, psychology, opinion, anthropology, archive etc. Would people be interested in the things we were interested in? Would they watch them, share them, engage with them? Thankfully the answer has been an emphatic yes. We’ve been blown away by the positive response from the audience to our content — whether it’s been our on our ‘In My Humble Opinion’ strand featuring people like palliative care specialist Kathryn Mannix (‘Dying is not as bad as you think’) to the amazing unsung heroine animator Lotte Reiniger , to the quirky question we’ve all been wondering ‘Does my name match my face?’. Of course not everything we do goes viral, but every day we learn more and more about what our audience likes and dislikes, and this definitely feeds into our production and commissioning thinking.

2. Completion rates on our platform are high. The second thing we’ve learnt is around completion rates. When we started we said we’d be producing and commissioning videos that were between 90 secs and 15 mins. Most of our videos are between 3 and 4 mins, but we’ve also been experimenting with a longer length — eg The women who pioneered electronic music (6:09 mins) and The woman who transformed Alzheimer’s research (7:17 mins). Average completion rates for these on the BBC Ideas website are 63% and 67% — and overall our average is 65%. Some videos are as high as 80%. In a world of endless choice and ever shorter attentions spans, this feels a good place to be.

3. There’s a load of fantastic indie talent out there. And finally when we started we were keen to work with both internal and external suppliers. One of the big questions in my mind is there a short-form digital indie ecosystem that we could tap into? Would they ‘get’ what we wanted and be able to supply it within our budgets and to our specification? Thankfully the answer there is also an emphatic yes — we’ve had two commissioning rounds so far with a total of around 315 pitches and 45 commissions. Cordelia Hebblethwaite our commissioning editor is working with range of different companies, many from the smaller end of the industry, which is great, as well as several predominantly tv or radio indies who are moving into digital.

I could go on about these learnings (or lessons, as the BBC Ideas product manager Lloyd Shepherd prefers to call them :-)), but three seems a good number to stop at for now.

As ever all feedback or thoughts about BBC Ideas is very welcome, so do leave a comment or get in touch.

You can follow more of the BBC Ideas team blogs over on their Medium channel.

Digital Creativity team trains photojournalists for School Report

2018-03-20T12:57:48+00:00

BBC D+E’s Digital Creativity team helped transform youngsters from four schools into photojournalists for the day last week.

It was all part of the BBC’s School Report News Day that involves 30,000 school children and 900 schools around the country. Around 130 students and 30 teaching staff from schools across the north came into Media City for workshops to enhance their digital and journalistic skills.

The D+E team collaborated with the BBC Academy to run a series of workshops that ended with the youngsters taking their own photographs around the Salford base and then publishing them on to the BBC’s creativity platform Mixital.

The theme of the day was accuracy and authenticity in news reporting – two values that are crucial to the BBC. The purpose of the workshop was how to apply the same values to tell stories accurately and fairly with photos.

Academy photographer Danielle Baguley explained some of the principles of photography by taking the groups through her portfolio that included photos from sporting events to Will.i.am. The youngsters were introduced to the principles of photojournalism and how to tell a story with pictures.

At the end of the workshops the youngsters were set the challenge of gathering their own photos around Media City to tell a story of urban regeneration. Back in the newsroom, the youngsters edited their photos, selected the best and wrote captions. They then published them on Mixital and you can see them here.

Six degrees of separation: from Bitesize to Snapchat

2017-05-25T06:44:00+00:00

Reaching out to younger audiences on the social platforms that are part of their everyday lives is an important objective for the BBC. Jenny Chapman, Digital Producer in BBC Learning, explains how The Mind Set Campaign created an initiative to target a specific age group on one such platform.

We recently produced some BBC campaign content on Snapchat and it is performing well. And Snap told us it was 'stand out and cool'. I am ridiculously pleased. And here’s why.

The Mind Set is a new BBC Learning campaign, which offers wellbeing support to the 740,000 15-16 year olds in the UK who are currently enduring the exam season. We know this group value peer advice, so our core offering is a series of videos featuring practical advice from last year’s exam sitters. We are working alongside partners such as Childline, YoungMinds and the National Citizen Service to offer as much support as possible.

This new content forms part of our Bitesize site - a BBC Learning product that offers curriculum content to 3–16 year olds.

Our research shows us that while Bitesize is well valued for that curriculum support, this age group tend towards social media for emotional support. It seemed clear that if our content was to benefit these young people then we needed it to appear in their social media feeds. We’re used to putting content on YouTube and driving to our BBC sites with Facebook, but you don’t need to study the data too much to see that this age group are massive Snapchat users.

The MindSet team decided to take our content to those users and place it natively on Snapchat in the form of three ten second videos inviting users feeling the pressure of exams to swipe up for our longer form content.

The BBC may embrace new media but when it is too ‘new’ for internal protocols, it can require some tenacity...

1. Our content is TV shaped. Snapchat users hold their phones upright. So our first challenge was to see if we could create high quality, on point, vertical video content (9:16) from our existing (16:9) campaign content. This format issue is actually quite a big deal for the BBC in giving younger audiences access to our archive. We got lucky on The Mind Set with our main campaign content having been shot widely with the young contributors physically in the centre. It was hard work finding other BBC content which allowed us to crop the sides mercilessly without losing impact or parts of the image itself.

9:16 ratio may be great for tall images, but cropping can still be an issue!

2. Our campaign content is suited for BBC sites. It needed reappraising for Snapchatters’ expectations. Successful content on Snapchat is eclectic but what is clear is that it is fast, loud (sound on), colourful and very efficient in delivering a short message. (Not for Snapchat the ‘authentic’ ramblings of the YouTube vlogger)

We know the rules - content on social media needs to be made for social media. However, we had no budget to commission new content (and this was an experiment) so we ruthlessly chopped, edited, paced up, annotated and turned up the sound with what we had.

Creating this content was actually great fun and a salutary reminder while immersed in PROCESS that content is what we do here.

3. Content on a non BBC site is nick-able. More seriously and less interestingly, there are legal agreements with the people who made and performed in it. I expect paperwork will change in the future but for now we had to approach the makers, writers and actors (apart from the bats) and negotiate new permissions.

4. We like people to come to the BBC. They’ve paid for it. Our social media protocols assume it. Placing content natively on social media doesn’t necessarily push users to the BBC sites and we have to weigh this up against the benefit of reaching new audiences where they are.

5. We like data. We’re public service and like to show we can spend the licence fee efficiently. Snapchat’s entire USP is based around privacy. After all, their core offering is to delete your snap as soon as it is seen and that is a key part of the fun of the app. Placing BBC content on their app meant accepting that while a new audience might benefit from it, we would not have the luxury of the statistical analysis our own site offers.

6. Have I mentioned the 9:16 thing?

The stats are still coming in, but we already know the first of the ten-second Top Snaps got over a million views, with 12% of viewers swiping up for the longer-form content beneath. Snap consider 3 – 5% a good performer (smiley face emoji). Those who did swipe up watched the long form content way longer than average.

So what did BBC Learning learn?

In the end value for our audiences depends on what it always has - high quality content when and where they need it and here at the BBC we are exploring what that ‘where’ might mean.

The Mindset audience are about to become licence fee payers. Increasingly this age group do not find content. It finds them.

Einstein & Newton: The brains behind the future of BBC Bitesize

2016-10-06T13:58:00+00:00

Over the last year, the Bitesize teams in Glasgow and Salford have been hard at work designing and shaping the Bitesize Mobile App for iOS and Android. Acting Engineering Manager James Constable outlines the aims behind the app and the challenges faced by his team.

Bitesize reaches 78% of GCSE-aged students in the UK, with 4 in 5 saying that it helped them to feel more prepared for their exams (1). It provides easy access to thousands of study guides and revision materials. In the past Bitesize has offered a one size fits all approach to accessing that content via its website, but when designing the Bitesize App we sought to make it easier for students to find what they need by only showing the content that is relevant to their studies.

The Challenges

Implementing these requirements offered some particular challenges to the team. The Bitesize Website talks to a varied collection of services to get information about the curriculum and the content associated with it. This includes our content management system, the BBC video metadata API, a triple-store that contains the curriculum ontology, the BBC Quiz engine ACME as well as our own propriety services that render equations and provide access to binary assets.

Having the App talk directly to all of these services would have increased complexity massively, and require us to reimplement the business logic for Bitesize in not only PHP (which the Bitesize Website is built using) but also Objective-C (for iOS) and Java (for Android).

With the additional desire to make this experience personalised for the user we knew it was time to build a service that would provide a solid foundation to build our Apps on and abstract those complications into a single place.

The Solution

Our solution was to build out a new data service layer for both versions of the App to talk to that would abstract away that complex business logic, or the need to talk to multiple different sources to retrieve and combine data.

Following a microservice architecture, we elected to split the data service layer in two - one for all of the content needs, and another to provide the layer of personalisation - and we called those services Einstein and Newton. The Bitesize Web Services team in Glasgow then set about implementing this strategy.

Each of the data services was designed as a RESTful API that followed a set of API Design Principles we defined. We wanted them to be generic and extensible so we could build new features atop of them and ensure (as much as possible) that the effort to implement those features was minimised across our platforms.

Technical Details

Over the last 18 months we’ve been moving our application and data services away from the BBC’s Forge infrastructure and towards cloud hosting services. Cloud hosting provides us with the flexibility to use modern technologies that we can develop quicker, deploy quicker and - most importantly - get value to BBC audiences quicker.

Our team had previous experience of transitioning applications to cloud hosting, using a relatively new platform - Node.JS. We elected to do that again for Einstein and Newton. Node.JS allowed us to lean on the JavaScript expertise that was already abundant in our team and the asynchronous, non-blocking paradigms it provides were perfect for a service that had to be in contact with many other BBC services for each request.

The traffic patterns around the Bitesize app are such that it isn’t always under heavy load. There are distinct peaks around exam time, and troughs around the summer holidays. Hosting the service on the AWS cloud means that we can reduce the infrastructure to save money during these quiet periods, but quickly scale up as demand increases.

A little help from our friends

While building Einstein and Newton we leant on a number of services provided by other teams in the BBC to help provide some of the infrastructure we needed.

The MyBBC platform provided us with an easy to integrate way of handling user authentication and storing user preferences in their ID and UAS services.

Our colleagues in Sport provide a system called Morph that provides us with a simple and effective way of pulling data from our database services, combining it and effectively caching that data.

The Platform Services team provide a ready to use API management tool that allowed us to implement key based profiling of our data services, allowing us to effectively monitor their use and understand the their performance.

Effectively combining these existing services meant that we were able to build out our service layer quickly - combining a lot of great work the BBC has already done, with our own team’s expertise in the UK curriculum and educational data models.

Ensuring quality

Right at the start of the project our Engineering team got together to discuss how we would go about testing these services. Traditionally the Bitesize team follows TDD and BDD principles when writing new features. This is backed up by a manual QA process where those features are double-checked to ensure that they implement the required functionality and meet the agreed specification.

APIs offer a unique challenge for testing. There isn’t a nice, visible interface to compare to a UX specification - the data is exposed as JSON structures that are primarily strings of text.

We decided that we didn’t want to submit our Test team to manually inspecting JSON structures and instead elected to have our developers and testers pair together to write integration tests for each feature that get run whenever we deploy a new version of the API.

We coupled this with an API spec written in API Blueprint. This open standard allowed us to communicate the API requirements and quickly provide mock services to the team building the native clients.

Automation all the way

One of the big changes we made was to go from manually releasing our code between integration, test and live environments to a fully automated deployment process.

Using Jenkins, an open source Continuous Integration platform, we were able to set up a pipeline that runs our unit tests, and performs static analysis on any changes to the code. If these checks pass then we automatically promote the code to the next environment and run a suite of integration tests. This ensures that what is deployed continues to meet the requirements of clients interacting with the API.

We also run the integration tests every night against each environment. Notifications of these appear in our Slack channel, allowing us to see immediately every morning whether any problems have occurred since the last deployment.

The Next Steps

As the App evolves we’ll add more features and expand the capabilities of these APIs. We’ll also be updating the Bitesize Website to bring the new features that the App provides to our web users - reusing the platform provided by Einstein and Newton to simplify that process.

(1) Based on research conducted by EdComs Research who specialise in research with teachers, learners of all ages, parents and education stakeholders.

BBC Online Briefing Winter 2014: Interacting, with BBC Knowledge and Learning

2014-12-09T11:11:32+00:00

Hi,

it was great to return to the BBC Online Briefing to talk to digital suppliers about the Our World War interactive video project.

To create this interactive episode we merged broadcast quality film footage with the visual grammar of gaming and animation in the form of digital “motion-comics”. By using techniques found in modern gaming experiences we set out to create something very new, a hybrid between a TV programme and a game experience – an interactive drama.

This innovative project was a BBC North based partnership between BBC Learning and Open Games teams working with MI, an interactive games agency based in Salford. You can read more about how that team developed this in Will Storer’s blog post.

You can also try out our latest Interactive video Footballers United

My colleague Chris Sizemore takes over the baton in the video below to talk about the motivations and ethos behind the BBC iWonder interactive guides and what plans he has for them over the next 6-12 months.

Tim Plyming and Chris Sizemore discuss the Our World War interactive video and iWonder

Tim Plyming, Executive Producer, BBC Knowledge & Learning

Connected Studio for Research and Education Space: Improving access to online educational resources

2014-08-04T08:46:37+00:00

Since my last post I've become Chief Technical Architect - Archives & Digital Public Space, at the BBC.

For the past few months I’ve been working with a team of developers and data architects to build a new system that will bring together linked open data catalogues from a wide range of online educational resources, improving access for teaching, learning and research.

Called Acropolis, it is the main technical component of an initiative called the Research and Education Space (RES) which the BBC is working on in partnership with Jisc and the British Universities Film and Video Council. It will bring together material relevant to education and research at all levels, from primary schools to post-doctoral research, indexing documents, images, sound and video from collections of material that are freely available or licensed for use in education.

The Acropolis platform will collect and index linked data describing a range of assets

RES provides an open, accessible catalogue of online educational resources that can be used in teaching, either directly within classroom materials and on electronic whiteboards or in materials developed by educational publishers and software providers.

But having great materials and a comprehensive catalogue is only the start: the real value of RES will come when there are products and tools built on top of the platform that can be used by teachers, students, researchers and learners of all ages to enhance activity in the classroom, laboratory and library.

We want to be led by developer’s expertise in how the data and the digital media can be presented, creating online experiences that will inspire learners, teachers and researchers by using applications built on the RES platform, and we want to encourage developers to build new products and services.

So I’m pleased to tell you that today we’re announcing a BBC Connected Studio focused on RES, inviting developers to find out more about our ambitions and pitch ideas for products that can be built on top of the RES platform. We have issued a Creative Brief that gives more detail about what we’re looking for, and I’d encourage you to read this and register for our Connected Studio Briefing, which is happening at Shoreditch Village Hall at 5.30pm on September 4th and will explain the process in detail—although if you can’t make it, all of the information will be posted online on September 5th.

The main event—a Development Studio—happens on September 29th and 30th, also at Shoreditch Village Hall. During the two days you’ll be given the opportunity to develop an idea and pitch it to a team of judges, and we’ll choose which of the ideas will be funded to take forward as audience-facing pilots. To be considered for a place at the Development Studio, you’ll need to register as a supplier to the BBC on our portal and complete a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) which will be published towards the end of August.

In the past a number of products have made it through the Connected Studio process, including BBC Weather Bot and Referend-erm?, and I hope that we’ll find some RES-shaped ideas that can inspire others to build on top of our new platform as it rolls out during 2015.

The RES partners all believe that there’s unlocked potential for online material to be used in teaching and research, and I'm looking forward seeing some great ideas for how teaching, research and learning can benefit from improved access to online resources.

Mo McRoberts is Chief Technical Architect, Archive and Digital Public Space, BBC

Connected Studio: Coding for Teenagers Build Studio

2014-07-24T09:58:15+00:00

I don’t know who was more excited - the seven shortlisted teams who had beaten thirty other fantastic projects to be selected for the Build Studio event. Or us – the BBC Coding for Teenagers project team. Either way, the energy and anticipation in the room were palpable.

For anyone unaware of what we’re up to – we are in the middle of a Connected Studio challenge. We set a brief which asked: what’s the best digital solution we could create to inspire younger teenagers – and especially girls - to discover coding in an appealing and entertaining way?

The Build Studio bit was a two-day prototype-building extravaganza. As Day One unfolded, each of the teams set up camp on the top floor of a sun-filled upper floor in a building at BBC MediaCity UK. Outside, views of Salford stretched for miles and miles. Inside, flipcharts were being set up, notebooks laid out – and in one case – a tailor’s dummy put in place.

The air began to hum with activity as each team started to think through how best to bring their ideas to life in a prototype of some sort. The countdown began. By the end of the next day, the teams would be pitching their prototypes and strategies in just ten minutes to win the chance to go through to the development stage.

So. Day One. The judging teams got together and re-evaluated the shortlisted projects, agreeing key pieces of guidance and direction we should give each of the groups. We then began a slow rotation around the room, stopping off at each project zone. Inevitably, we’d gathered into what our planner had called a ‘huddle’. One by one, we chatted to each group, answered any questions they had and tried to give them steers on what we thought would be useful to focus on.

The first time I went to BBC North, I was dazzled by the buildings and the vibrancy of the place. It’s one of the most creative places in the BBC – and with its jazzy monochrome carpets and liquorice allsorts colour scheme, how could anyone fail to be inspired? It certainly seemed to be working on the teams. Fuelled by coffee and cookies, there was a festive spirit in the air as the pace picked up through the afternoon.

One group - of awe-inspiring teenage developers, as it happens – was busy tearing up bits of paper and moving them around a makeshift grid as they plotted moves and mechanics.

Another had a young woman programmer, fingertips seemingly glued to her device, churning out code as if she was typing a well-rehearsed story.

Perched on the edge of a sofa in another of the teams was a chap with a warm cup of water and a handful of white, melting stuff that he was mysteriously dipping into the liquid. To soften, apparently. He didn’t give away much at that point so for the rest of us it seemed either cool and enigmatic or slightly bonkers.

Part way through the afternoon, the teams got to meet target audience groups to test theories and get some early feedback. The idea was to give them the chance to hone their projects with real, live audience insight.

The hours whizzed by and before we knew it, the July sun began to set. Somewhat fittingly, a rather lovely rainbow arced across the sky. We gathered around in a circle and gave each other an update on progress so far. Tired but enthused, we packed everyone off for a well-deserved rest and arranged to meet up bright and early the next day.

Day Two had a frenetic yet excited edge to it. The judging huddle circled around again and reminded everyone to focus on two key things – how was their proposition going to appeal to our target audience? And what was it about their idea that would be somehow enhanced by working with the BBC?

As four o’clock loomed large, the teams practiced their pitches and reached for one last gulp of coffee. It was time to present the prototypes.

Dragon’s Den style, we judges lined up on the front row. Needless to say, we weren’t disappointed. It was quite extraordinary what the teams had managed to accomplish in just two days. And I loved the different ways they showcased their ideas.

One group used eye-catchingly creative pictures they had taken of themselves to illustrate one application of their work; another gave us a nail-biting live demo using the co-ordinates of the Quay House building. There was the group that had managed to get access to Radio 1 DJ Greg James to make a polished video as part of their presentation. Another team cleverly manipulated BBC assets to brilliant effect. One project gave us a really smart insight into their thinking into what might appeal to teenage girls by showing the link between their idea and the popularity of loom bands. Then there was the project that lit up the stage with some twinkly lights; and the team who showcased how their idea could be skinned for different applications with different audience groups across BBC channels and services. All in all a roll call of coding creativity.

Us judges are getting together soon to review the pitches and make our bets. I can assure you of one thing – it isn’t going to be easy.

As I said to the teams at the end of the sessions – they’ve given us such a challenging task, choosing who goes through to the next stage is a rather nice problem to have. I’ll be back soon to let you know how we get on. Watch this space…

Kerensa Jennings is Head of Strategic Delivery, BBC

BBC iWonder: why did we start with a question?

2014-07-14T06:56:26+00:00

My name is Paul Crowley. Until recently, I headed up the User Experience & Design team on BBC Knowledge & Learning.

And this is a blog post about the development of the BBC iWonder brand which was launched in March of this year. It’s about how we took user centred designs, a strong editorial proposition and product leadership and created a brand.

Half-way through 2013, the editorial, product and technical work for the new K&L product had been in development for some time. We had a good idea of how things would work. We mostly understood the content ambitions. We knew that the entire proposition would be fully responsive, and would work on all devices. We knew that the heart of the proposition was our new, interactive guides.

The User Experience & Design team had been working on the user experience and design for some time. Knowing what we did, we’d already come a long way.

But, we were starting to struggle.

We knew what the new product did. We knew who we wanted to use it. But we couldn’t articulate what our audience should be saying about our new product when they experienced it. We didn’t know how it was supposed to make you feel.

A good deal of investigative and speculative work had already been done to bring concepts to life. But without a definitive personality or attitude for the new brand we couldn’t assess the effectiveness of it. We knew we still had a way to go, but we needed to agree on where we were going.

Then the name for the new product was finalised: iWonder.

With the name confirmed, some thought that the development of the brand and visual identity would be a straightforward thing to finalise. We already had detailed wireframes for the product. Surely we just needed to choose the best of our concepts from the previous exploration work and apply them to the new name, right?

Wrong. We knew we could do much better.

We’d already made progress on ideas for the visual identity with the agency Studio Output. However, without confidence in what the brand was, we’d generated lots of great concepts, but no consensus.

This was an important moment. When many expected us to charge ahead, we stopped. We questioned. We asked ‘what do we want the iWonder brand to be? What do we value? What is the essence of its personality? How will we make others feel when we get this right?

If we knew the answers to these questions, we’d know what ‘better’ meant in objective terms. We needed words that described the brand’s personality. Words that drove decisions. Words we could draw. Put simply, words that described the essence of the brand in a way that would align us all and take subjectivity out of the equation. If the true test of a brand is the way that the end user feels about their experience, these ‘words we could draw’ would be our blueprint. People relate to other people, so we needed to describe iWonder like we would a person. How would it behave, how would it appear, how would it make you feel? Getting this right wouldn’t just help with the visual design, it would help us set the tone for all our output – from the design of experiences right through to the tone of voice in our tweets and the way that we wrote our guides. We wouldn’t just have a visual identity, we’d have a rounded and descriptive personality that could be flexed to different contexts, and applied consistently to everything we do.

Brilliantly curious

With clarity on what was missing, I brought in Brand Strategy Consultants, Elmwood to help us shape the iWonder brand.

There was pressure to show progress, and we were short of time. This ‘reboot’ meant spending time on deliverables that appeared tangential to the ‘requirements’. In retrospect I’m delighted that I pushed for this.

Building on the original product vision of ‘keeping the UK curious’, we worked with Elmwood to develop a set of brand values (edited below for length) we could all agree on.

We wanted to describe iWonder like we would a person, so acting as the brand, we’d be:

Hungry to discover more. We, like our users, are boundlessly curious, we have an inquisitive nature which is at the heart of what we do.
Independent thinking. We support our audience, giving them confidence to determine their own conclusions in the quickest, most effective and entertaining way possible.
Championing different perspectives. We see the world differently. There are many ways to look at a subject and we like to provoke. Itʼs great to be curious.

From here, we settled on words that described how iWonder should be perceived:

Fascinating. Weʼre charismatic to be around so we want to entertain as well as stimulate and delight our users..
Brave. We want people to have faith and trust in the information we give them so itʼs important for us to be bold in our service.
Conversational. We donʼt want our audience to feel like theyʼre being lectured. We are friendly, accessible and above all great company.

Our impact. iWonder should make audiences feel:

Intrigued. We want to stimulate our audienceʼs curiosity and create an experience that leaves them wanting to come back for more.
Enlightened. We want our users to walk away from iWonder with a sense of wonderment, enriched and smarter than they were before. What great social currency.
Captivated. We want to help our audience to enjoy an effortless, entertaining experience. Every aspect of our user engagement should be rewarding.

And finally, iWonder’s cause:

On a journey

We see the world differently. Weʼre endlessly curious, questioning and provocative.

iWonder has a streak of child like wonderment running through the centre of it. Every experience should be something new, surprising and delighting as though experienced for the first time.

There are many ways to look at a subject and we represent all views. We like to share, we like to provoke, we like to challenge normative thinking. Itʼs good to be curious - we take people on a ride which helps them feel at ease with asking questions.

Weʼre a brand which believes in actions too. Interactivity is at the heart of what we do. We are exciting, enlightening and vibrant. Weʼre about doing not just viewing. We are Brilliantly Curious.

Brilliantly Curious. This deceptively simple phrase became the pivotal and foundational element. It gave us the ‘words we could draw.’

Back to the drawing board

With the brand personality finalised, Tom Bradley and Bob Hamilton continued the work with Studio Output to finalise the user experience and visual design work. Starting with the iWonder logotype, they took time to review all of the previous research and concepts, and added in new ideas to create a number of concepts for a reboot.

The front-runner

One of our success criteria for the logotype was that it contained something distinctive, recognisable and usable as a call-to-action when promoting content on other BBC sites; much like the play button inside the iPlayer marque.

The standout concept from the previous work integrated a question mark. This expressed the brand personality most clearly. After all a question is a direct expression of curiosity.

We liked this approach. The dot on the question mark had been plucked from the ‘o’ above – representing curiosity literally, with a slightly curious implementation. However, the typeface (Tondo) was too playful to be appropriate to the entire breadth and tone of iWonder content. There was the essence of an idea here, but that typeface needed to go.

We took the question mark approach and redrew it to better align with the GEL aesthetic of our other online products. We started with Helvetica.

With a few modifications, we were pretty happy. We talked about whether the cut-away in the ‘W’ was one trick too many, but we liked the way it made the letter feel less dominant. It let the name flow, leading you to read it like the start of a question and not two separate sentences: ‘I wonder, not: I. Wonder’. It also added intricacy, or more specifically ‘curiosity’ to the overall marque. It wasn’t what you’d expect, yet it scanned well.

Still, we couldn’t help feeling that we needed a font with a little more personality. Referring again to the Elmwood work, Helvetica felt too clinical, too functional to support the fascinating, brave, conversational tone we were after.

Eventually we found a font named Sharp Sans (designed by Lucas Sharp) which hit the mark. It expressed the desired personality AND it sat well with the BBC’s GEL aesthetic.

With the decision made, we then commissioned some modifications to help the font sit even more firmly within the overall BBC GEL experience. The new font, Curious Sans, is now embedded inside all iWonder pages and used for titles. We’re the first BBC digital product to do this.

More than just a marque

Of course the brand is much more than a logotype. We needed to think about expressing the brand across the visual, editorial and functional aspects of the product.

We started with the core of the new product - the iWonder guide. We wanted to make sure the editorial proposition and the user experience around it was aligned to the brand personality. Visually and editorially, the experience needed to be ‘brilliantly curious.’

Hook, narrative, reflection

We started with the use of photography. Tying image selection into the fabric of the guides, different types of imagery were to be specifically selected for each stage of the experience.

Hook images are used for promotion, or at the start of the guide. They act as a means of picquing user curiosity. We want them to lean forwards and be seduced by the content. They are deliberately, provocatively selected and cropped so as to invite attention. What is this? What can’t I see? Show me more.

Narrative images then help to tell the overall story. They draw the user through the content and help explain or illustrate information, ideas and concepts.

Finally, Reflection images (literally) zoom out to show the bigger picture. They emphasise the new perspective that has been arrived at by working through a guide.

The colour journey

Colour was also an essential step in bringing our brand to life. In the absence of a brand personality, earlier uses of colour had veered towards a neutral, de-saturated palette. This was largely due to lack of confidence in what we wished to convey. This changed completely with the development of the brand personality. ‘Brilliantly curious’ didn’t just describe a cerebral quality, but a visceral, visual, and vibrant one. To support the brand, colour needed to be bright, bold, saturated. Distinctive and sometime clashing colours would embody the brand’s personality.

We also decided that we would use colour to convey visually, the learning journey at the heart of guides. As the user works through the guide, the accent colours change subtly from dark to light. The experience is literally enlightening.

We didn’t choose just one gradient either. ‘Brilliantly curious’ suggested an explosion of colour. We created multiple, inter-changeable colourways. We could choose colours appropriate to the tone of the material. We could ensure that the iWonder homepage would be vibrant, bold, brilliant. Colour wasn’t to be tied to the iWonder logotype. In fact, this would be white – and deferential to the content. The colour in iWonder would be tied to the experience.

Steps on a journey

iWonder Guides are created as a series of distinct steps. Content can be consumed in a measured and productive way.

With this in mind, we developed a visual numerical system. It was derived from the iWonder marque to help the user understand where they are within an overarching journey. Because the final moment of reflection at the end of guide is an integrated and key part of the whole experience, the representation of the final step literally 'completes the circle’.

Putting it all together

With the design work mostly finalised, the final challenge was to take the visual system for the brand into the technical development of the Knowledge and Learning product. With the launch date ever closer, this meant balancing the brand specific elements with other editorial priorities that were being worked on.

We worked closely with development teams to agree upon the foundations of the brand that were vital, andthrough these discussions, further refined many of the visual design treatments.

It’s an iterative process, and we still have plenty to work on. But we’re very pleased with the way our first few guides and the new iWonder homepage have brought the brand to life.

Looking back at the journey we’ve been on, I’m delighted with the outcome. I’m also delighted that like our brand, we took the opportunity to stop, to question.

The iWonder proposition is the result of the hard work of a great many BBC staff. The development of the iWonder brand itself was led by:

Tom Bradley, Creative Director
Bob Hamilton, Senior User Experience Designer
Janine Horsfall and Steph Rowbottom, BBC Marketing and Audiences
Ian Myatt, Head of Product for Knowledge & Learning
Andy Pipes, Executive Product Manager for Knowledge & Learning
Studio Output. User Experience and Visual Design Consultants
Elmwood. Brand Strategy Consultants
And myself.

Paul Crowley is the Head of User Experience & Design for myBBC, GEL, Homepage and Content Discovery.

Connected Studio: One Planet

2014-05-19T08:48:47+00:00

Last week I had knee surgery and as they were preparing the anaesthesia one of the medical team causally asked me what I do. Rather than get into a long-winded explanation about digital transformation, I told them that I am currently working with the people who make BBC Natural History programmes, like Planet Earth, Africa, Frozen Planet. They all stopped in their tracks… “Wow!” was the collective response. “Those shows are amazing…” “The best thing the BBC does…” Before I had a chance to explain that sadly I can take no credit for them whatsoever, they put me under the anaesthesia. The last thing I remembering hearing was "I am so impressed." This story encapsulates the sentiment that so many people share, in the UK and around the globe, that the BBC’s landmark Natural History productions are one of the jewels in its crown.

Natural History is a perfect candidate for exploring digital innovation. The genre transcends language, age, politics, geography. Wanting to feel connected to & inspired by our planet something people yearn for. The BBC’s television programming has been satisfying this need for decades, but has yet to master how to do the same via digital media.

Can we take something like the next big landmark production (working title: ‘One Planet’) and weave an integrated and innovative digital idea within it? Filming for this programme has only just begun, and with 60+ shoots over the next few years, in countries all around the world, the opportunities for shaping content or experiences beyond television seem endless.

One Planet looks at the complex story of diversity and it is being filmed using an immersive approach – allowing viewers to experience the world through the eyes & senses of its animal protagonists. Therefore the Connected Studio challenge will be to use digital technologies to immerse audiences deeper into these natural arenas. This digitally powered experience should heighten our audience’s emotional connection to our planet & the ingenious animals we share it with.

We are looking for exceptional ideas that can stand up to the established quality of these programmes, but that can also work in their own right. Because BBC nature landmarks are co-funded with BBC Worldwide, the audience is global. Planet Earth was broadcast in over 250 countries around the world, so the scale of this pilot is potentially huge.

If you are interested in being part of the reinvention of nature landmarks for the digital age, please do visit the Connected Studio website and read the brief.

We are looking for the best creative digital minds in the UK. People who are fascinated by the future of digital stories, creative technology, the evolution of television and interactive content. If you are working in a digital agency or as a freelancer, or at the BBC, please join us on the day!

Eva Appelbaum is Head of Digital Strategy and Innovation, Landmarks, BBC Natural History Unit

Connected Studio: coding for teenagers

2014-05-13T08:56:16+00:00

The UK has a special place in the story of digital pioneering. Birthplace of the man who invented the world wide web – it’s also the home of computer science, the world’s first algorithm and game-changing game-makers like Rockstar North and Mind Candy. From Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Turing, and Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace to Grand Theft Auto to Moshi Monsters – it’s an impressive roll-call.

But we have a growing digital skills deficit that threatens our future potential and impact on the global stage.

The BBC is uniquely placed to play its part as a catalyst for change. We want to work in partnership with others to shine a spotlight on the wonderful world of digital, and to help inspire people to see their own creative potential within it. The BBC wants to do its bit to ‘bring digital home’.

I'm involved in developing a number of plans to do this – and just one of the challenges we want to address is this: what’s the best digital solution we could create to inspire younger teenagers – and especially girls - to discover coding in an appealing and entertaining way? And how can we help ignite their creative potential?

If you’d like to help us meet this challenge, this is the plan.

The BBC Connected Studio team is offering digital agencies, tech start-ups and developers (including BBC staff) an exciting opportunity. Connected Studio invites partners like these (and maybe like you?), from inside and outside of the BBC to work together collaboratively on a digital brief. The winning ideas could be selected for development into working prototypes and end up being commissioned using BBC investment. More information and the reasons for coming up with this challenge are outlined in the development brief.

Having been a teenager once (too long ago)… I know that whatever the answer is will be a subtle blend of ingredients. Unlike the one I grew up in, today’s digital world is such a collaborative, expressive and social place. The possibilities are endless. And there are some wonderful (and very, very cool) role models out there – too many to mention. People like Emma Mulqueeny from Young Rewired State; like Avid Larizadeh from Code.org; like Joanna Shields from Tech City UK; like the entrepreneur Sherry Coutu; like the model Lily Cole – who loves coding; like Wendy Devolder from Skills Matter; like Annika Small from Nominet Trust; like Helen Goulden from Nesta; like Kathryn Parsons from Decoded. All amazing people who are doing extraordinary things in this space.

When I was a little girl, my Mum had a punch card machine (an offshoot of Charles Babbage's invention) in our dining room - and worked as a software engineer. Mum told me what she was doing was giving instructions ‘to tell computers what to do’. My Dad – who had been an electrical engineering apprentice in Devonport Dockyard - built us a computer at home, and Mum taught my brother, sister and me how to do flow charts and write simple programs. I was a teenager in the eighties when the BBC joined forces with Acorn to create the BBC Micro.

Fast forward to today and the lines are completely blurred between the digital and non-digital worlds. Digital is everywhere. My eleven year old god-daughter Ella does her homework on a computer. My seven year old niece Anya could type her name (and mine) on a keyboard before she hit three. It’s not unusual to see a toddler try to ‘swipe’ a TV set; or get frustrated ‘double-clicking’ on an inanimate picture in a book. The younger generation expect digital experiences in everything they do. It’s second nature.

But somewhere along the way, we forgot about teaching our youngsters how to ‘tell computers what to do’. Our country is facing a digital skills shortage. In time, the new computing curriculum which is coming into English schools this September will help pupils in England, but meanwhile as Microsoft discovered, there were more than 100,000 job vacancies in IT last year – and what about everyone else across the UK?

That’s not to say thousands of youngsters have found out anyway – and there are fantastic opportunities out there for anyone whose interest is piqued: Code Club, Code Academy, CoderDojo, Make Things Do Stuff to name a few, as well as inspirational community offers like Minecraft and DIY and bodies like Computing at School and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, as well as Apps for Good and Free:Formers.

But what about the other youngsters – who have yet to stumble upon the feeling of being ‘a genius’ (as one pupil put it to me) - when you can tell a computer what to do or express yourself in a creative, digital way.

I’m hoping we can channel the spirit of the BBC Micro to breathe life into the aspirations of teenagers today. Who knows, we may end up inspiring the digital pioneers of the future - the next Ada Lovelace or the next Tim Berners-Lee. The BBC wants to use its unique role to make a difference – and with your help, maybe we will.

You can apply to take part in the Creative Studio: Coding for Teenagers, or find out more about Connected Studio, via the Connected Studio website.

Kerensa Jennings is Head of Strategic Delivery, BBC

BBC iWonder home page launched

2014-03-19T10:30:33+00:00

Hello again. I'm Chris Sizemore, Executive Editor for the BBC's Knowledge & Learning product.

Today we're launching the BBC iWonder homepage. BBC iWonder is a new factual and educational brand from the BBC, and it's all about feeding the UK's curiosity.

The BBC iWonder home page on three screens

BBC iWonder provides thought-provoking answers to the questions sparked in your everyday life - questions sparked by BBC programmes, what's in the news, important anniversaries, or what's trending on social media. The iWonder homepage will always feature plenty of examples of the Interactive Guide, our new flagship content format that makes learning feel effortless and entertaining. An Interactive Guide is more than just a webpage - it's a visually exciting experience that invites you to lean forward, "turn the page" and find out what happens next. The design is uncluttered, the learning is subtle, and within every exploration of iWonder content you'll find a moment to reflect: an opportunity for a deeper appreciation of a topic. I’m hoping that over time BBCiWonder will grow into a tool that helps people track, plan and discover the next steps in their learning.

You can check the BBC iWonder homepage regularly to see the latest Guides, top up your inspiration, and find something unexpected and thought-provoking to get curious about.

In time, the BBC iWonder homepage will introduce you to something surprising, provocative, exciting and challenging each day, hand-picking the most inspiring BBC content and blending it with the most wondrous stuff from around the Web and BBC Online. And, as you'd expect from the BBC and iWonder, the experience is fully responsive across different digital devices and screen sizes.

So far, BBC iWonder Interactive Guides have explored themes from World War One, such as "Pigeon vs telephone: which worked best in the trenches?", in support of the BBC's ongoing World War One Centenary season. Our next step is to begin publishing Guides about other topics, for example: "Could you learn to sing Calon Lân in 30 minutes?" and from additional genres such as Science: "How do we know the Big Bang actually happened?". So, keep an eye out over the next few weeks as we'll be adding new and exciting content to the homepage.

We're also launching a BBC iWonder presence on the social network Twitter today. Twitter is a natural place to exhange knowledge, and is already used by many users who we know will appreciate iWonder and can help us get the word out to those who'll probably enjoy it, but haven't heard about iWonder yet. In addition to our Interactive Guides, we'll often highlight something really wondrous from the Web - after all, the BBC doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination, have a monopoly on producing or publishing the kind of content that keeps your curiosity piqued! Over the course of the next months, of course, we'll expand onto other appropriate social networks where BBC iWonder can best serve licence fee payers.

My ambition is for BBC iWonder to combine world-class story-telling with cutting edge digital innovation. I hope you'll agree that iWonder feels fresh and looks amazing on tablets and smartphones. The new BBC iWonder homepage gives your curiosity a new jumping-off point - so if you are curious about iWonder, bookmark it and follow @BBCiWonder.

I'd love to hear what you think about our new homepage - please do leave comments below.

Chris Sizemore is Executive Editor, BBC iWonder

BBC iWonder: Introducing interactive guides

2014-01-19T18:00:09+00:00

Today we’re announcing BBC iWonder, a bold new brand whose mission is to unlock the learning potential of all BBC content.

We know that people's curiosity is often sparked by BBC programmes, and also by the world around them. BBC iWonder is for these curious minds, and at its' heart is a new content format, interactive guides. Guides will invite people to lean forward, and actively explore a range of factual and education topics from Science and Natural History, Arts, History, Religion and Ethics, Food and more. In this blog post, I’ll outline the features of iWonder interactive guides, as well as what to expect from this new format in the near future.

Interactive guides on three screens

A new way to tell stories on the web

Interactive guides take a different approach to presenting content compared to traditional web articles or TV and radio programmes online. They organise video and audio, rich infographics, written summaries, and activities into stories that make the most of our interactive medium. We know from plenty of research that people learn better by doing, and we’ve designed our guides to be “sit forward,” placing a user’s interactions with the content at the core of the experience. Interactive guides take the audience through a series of steps that ask them to look at multiple perspectives of intriguing questions, always with the chance to reflect on the significance of the story at the end.

The initial set of interactive guides mark the start of the World War One season on the BBC and are presented by experts including Dan Snow, Kate Adie, Ian McMillan and Neil Oliver. For more on these read Executive Producer Tim Plyming’s blog post.

A multi-screen modern media landscape

More and more of our audiences are accessing our content via mobile and tablet devices. In fact, for the first time this past Christmas, the proportion of people visiting the BBC Food website from a tablet or smartphone was larger than those visiting from a PC. This trend is set to continue. With the look and feel of “native mobile applications” getting ever more immersive, our audience’s expectations of accessing content on their phones and tablets is high. Expecting our users to struggle to navigate a full “desktop” website on a tiny screen isn’t acceptable any longer.

We all instinctively know that learning is not something that happens at a single time or place only, sitting quietly at a desk or with a PC. Our guides display beautifully no matter what screen size you view them on, accompanying you as you move through your life - at school, home or work, while you're on the go, or while you wait for something else to happen.

To achieve this, our team has employed responsive web design from our first lines of code. With responsive web design, the devil is in the detail. On mobile especially, response times are absolutely crucial. If a web page takes longer than a couple of seconds to load, you’ve already lost a huge percentage of potential browsers. To keep response times down to a minimum, we’ve had to develop a system that loads in just the essential components of the page at the right times. Mobile-sized images download first, then when the page’s Javascript detects the browser’s capabilities, higher-resolution images get ‘loaded in dynamically.’ This can mean the difference of up to a mega-byte’s worth of content for a browser to download. At that page weight, a mobile browser can become agonisingly slow.

For pictures with a dense amount of information on them, such as infographics, it’s important not just to resize a smaller version of a big image, but to load in a completely different image that’s best for that screen. Usually this means a more “zoomed in” view right for mobile. Our system elegantly handles all this image swapping without the user ever noticing. Try reducing the width of your browser window to see it in action at the link above.

We’ve strived for this ‘invisible’ elegance in other places too. For instance, we load in the correct media player for any device behind the scenes, so that visitors on an iPhone don’t get served a Flash player, which won’t work on their Apple device. In this way, everyone should get exactly the same high-quality experience, all the time.

The BBC also has a firm commitment to both web accessibilityand backwards compatibility, making our experiences just as pleasing on older browsers such as Internet Explorer 8 as on newer, more capable web browsers. We’ve taken care to ensure that for users with Javascript turned off, or for those using screen readers, all the content is both available and understandable.

Being able to repeatedly produce immersive experiences

Over the past year or so, many highly engaging web experiences have delighted web audiences, such as the New York Times’ Snowfall story. When our development team first set out to imagine what our interactive guides experience should be, we looked at those examples with a degree of envy. But we also noticed that most seemed to be “one-offs” and didn't work well on mobile devices. We were adamant that we wanted our new format to have all the qualities of this class of highly immersive story - but tailored for every device - whilst being straightforward for our editorial teams to reproduce quickly and repeatedly.

Those were the three main principles which guided our development, and are the reason the iWonder interactive guides represent such a giant leap forward in the BBC's ability to inspire and support learning. Our editorial colleagues now have a toolkit that lets them to put together and publish these rich stories in hours or days, rather than the weeks that it might have taken just a year or so ago. And whereas in the past, each rich story experience would require its own bespoke code and design, there's now just one codebase to maintain and add features to.

In the coming months, we’re adding a collection of activities that will sit within the guide format's sequence of ‘steps’. Look out for visual quizzes, clickable infographics, and plenty of other digital toys to play with, as the library of options available to our production team grows.

I'd love you to know what you think, so please do leave a comment.

Andy Pipes is Executive Product Manager, Knowledge and Learning