Meeting with Jane Quinn

Today we had a meeting with Jane Quinn who has lots of experience in setting up internet and cross-platform resources with children in her career with the BBC. The meeting followed a lecture, which proved very insightful as it helped us define our idea as 'Pan-Platform' rather than straightforward cross platform. Pan platform she explained involved one message being told through several different media which are all linked together in one place, whereas cross platform is about accessing different types of media in different places which are all linked.

Our meeting with Jane Quinn was really useful and she had some really positive feedback about the project and thought it was a good idea but also warned us that it was quite ambitious which she said there was nothing wrong with as long as we were careful that we didn't overstretch ourselves with such a big concept. She also said that the biggest challenge we would have is linking the stages of the story together. Which I hoped we would achieve as I feel responsible for this aspect as I developed the idea and the script.

She also thought that our target market of 6-7 which we had linked in with the curriculum seemed appropriate and it was good that we could back up our choice of audience with this research.

We also asked her about the difficulty of approaching both a male and female audience at this age. Jane seemed to think this was do-able along as we had a good mixture of things that would appeal to both boys and girls. Particularly boys whom she said required a strong action element and were more put off by feminine elements that girls would be about masculine ones i.e. she advised us to avoid using the colour pink on any of our product as this could potentially put boys off.

She also helped us realise what the aim of this product was and provided us with the term 'soft-learning' meaning that its primary goal is to entertain with the opportunity for the user to learn some things in a passive way. This she said is usually the approach with many of the CBBC websites and therefore seems appropriate for our product as we could potentially market it to the BBC.

She also gave us a few things to go away and think about such as:

What is the user going to get out of it?

Where is the endpoint?

How do we make the ideas of books or the library appealing to 6-7 year olds.

In response to these I feel as though the user will hopefully gain a greater understanding about fairytales whilst taking part in something that is enjoyable and really excites and encourages their own imagination and creative ability.

I realised that I need to come up with the story in its entirety in order to present this to possible investors.

And the third point is definitely another thing we have to work on, trying to make all aspects of the website and other materials involved and exciting and as colourful as possible.