Having worked with the BBC for a number of years, we’re relatively familiar with their standard educational content projects. However, when we looked at the brief for their KS2 Explorers project we saw a unique creative challenge. As part of the Teach programme, they were looking to base a series on famous explorers, which would enable teachers to use the narratives as an umbrella to teach students about a range of subjects across the curriculum.
We created a series of beautifully designed animations, each focus on a specific explorer and their amazing story. We wanted to truly bring these explorers to life and immerse the audience in their story, whilst also having a way to ask the questions that the children who are watching would love to ask to these historic characters.
At the core of the creative was the ‘Holo-Lab’ – a fantastical machine that allowed us to conjure up holograms of the explorers. In the Holo-Lab, two young presenter characters ask questions about their lives and show the most interesting, exciting and educationally important parts of the explorers’ lives. The questions & reactions of our two young presenters helped contextualise the events to our young audience and promoted student-led pedagogy throughout the series.
We have received hugely positive results from teachers, with a number of them telling us that the films are a fresh and engaging way to teach their students a number of different cross-curricular subjects, whilst keeping a constant theme running throughout. The social cuts have also been very successful on the BBC Teach social channels – with a high view rate and most importantly - strong click through to the full resources.
The series can be viewed here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/class-clips-video/ks2-explorers/zjh8bdm