We have been contacted by many teachers asking us about Moshi as it has become more widely used in schools as a contextual tool to engage children in the classroom.

We have been bowled over by the support we have received from Derek Robertson and the teachers involved in Learning & Teaching Scotland. Margaret Young at Port of Menteith Primary School is an exceptional example of how teachers are embracing the use of games in the classroom. Here they have been using Moshi to bridge the gap between fiction and reality. The children have been creating their own shops and thinking about how they would run them, designing brochures for the Monstro City tourist office and thinking about how they could sell the Monstro City properties. They have created their own puzzle palace and filled it with puzzles they love playing. They have been motivated to write, draw and read around the subject. These brilliant teachers are putting learning back in the hands of the children by using a medium that they understand and connect with.

Pete Wells from the Sunderland City Learning Centre sent us some blog entries created by three children Adam, Anika and Shanice who were encouraged to adopt monsters, create their own personalities and show them off, another great example of how Moshi and other games can be used in teaching children about Information and Communication Technology.

Moshi is even being used on the other side of the world to teach children, “Moshi Monsters utilises educational content, through vocabulary and arithmetic to logic and spatial skills. Moshi Monsters has been designed to be a ‘fun, safe and educational’ website for all age groups”.

We would love to hear from you (teachers and kids) if you have been using Moshi Monsters and/or Tutpup in your classroom to aid learning in new and exciting ways, drop us a line and let us know what you have been up to.

Last night was the opening, and Mind Candies were out in force to attend, joining in with the fun and games on what was a great evening. Here are some photos from the event.

The festival attracts digital creatives, hardcore geeks and entrepreneurs from around the world, who descend upon the city of Austin, Texas, to share their passion and creativity, pass on their knowledge, try out new cutting-edge technologies and of course attend amazing parties.

Though some of the team had been to last years event, this year Divinia and Toby actually ran a Core Conversation entitled Playing to Learn – Educating Kids Through Gaming, which was very rewarding, resulting in a great debate between the attendees.

This is what the team had to say about their experiences at SXSW 2009:

All in all, it was an amazing rewarding experience for us all, one that I would definitely recommend to anyone who hasn’t been but is considering it, and we all hope to be back in Austin for SXSW 2010!

Some Mind Candies went along to the Game Based Learning Conference 2009 unfortunately we were only able to get tickets for the Friday so missed the Pecha Kucha and socialising, but we were there for the whole of Friday for all the great speeches.

Almost every speaker mentioned the travesty of the recent Department of Heath’s Change4Life campaign depicting a listless looking child holding a Playstation controller with the provocative slogan ‘Risk an Early Death’. It was up to Tom Watson to convince the industry that the government wasn’t completely against us. Luckily he made it clear he realises the importance of the games industry to the success of the country in terms of economy as well as education but, like any good politician, successfully dodged a question about tax breaks.

Of most interest to us here at Mind Candy was Derek Robertson who focused on a teacher using Moshi Monsters in the classroom. It’s useful for us to see how teachers are making use of Moshi and it would be great to start a proper conversation with educators about what we can do to make Moshi more friendly for teachers to use as a resource.

For me the overarching message from the conference was that gaming in all forms is hugely educational; it beats traditional education methods because kids actually enjoy learning when they are playing games, but there is still a long way to go before it is seen as legitimate by the mainstream.

I’m really interested to see where this conversation goes and looking forward to installing my children into Nolan Bushnell’s ‘Podules’. Check out all the videos here

Pete Fowler's specially-created 800ft Monsterism Island mural

There will be plenty for kids to get involved with too including a Monsters Den, Treasure Hunt, and the chance to view the 25 winners of the Design a Monster competition that we ran at Moshi Monsters.

The event is taking place at the Idea Generation Gallery in Shoreditch (11 Chance Street, London, E2 7JB) from April 8th until May 4th. The gallery is open Monday to Friday from noon until 6pm, and on weekends from noon until 5pm.

We hope to see you there!

There is a private view party on Tuesday 7th April (from 6:30pm) but places are limited – drop us a line if you’re keen to come along and we’ll see what we can do.

We recently launched our biggest ever competition at Moshi Monsters.  Aspiring artists have the chance to draw their own Moshling and potentially see it framed and exhibited at a major new art exhibition in London.

We think it’s is a fantastic chance for young artists to see their work recognised alongside some of the world’s greatest Monster illustrators, and in front of a audience of thousands.

We’re really keen to spread the word on this and would love for teachers to pick up on the competition and get their classes involved.  Feel free to tell the world!

This is the blog post from the Daily Growl that goes into a little more detail, and here’s the official release that we put out today:

Good luck all!

GLOBAL COMPETITION FOR MONSTROUS YOUNG ARTISTS!

Moshi Monsters offers young artists the chance to draw their own Monster and have it featured at the upcoming ‘Monsters Inked’ exhibition

LONDON, UK – Mind Candy (developers of the online game for kids, www.moshimonsters.com) today announced the launch of a new global competition inviting young artists to design their very own Moshling, (a collectable pet monster) for the chance to have it brought to life within the Moshi Monsters game.

The lucky winner will also get the opportunity for their creation to feature in the upcoming exhibition “Monsters Inked” @ Idea Generation gallery from April 8th – May 4th. Winners will get to see their creations displayed alongside other great artists including new work by Monsterism Island creator Pete Fowler, and a world-first display of 20 illustrations by Flanimals artist Rob Steen from the much-
loved Ricky Gervais book.

Michael Smith, CEO of Mind Candy commented: “It’s a great competition for children of all ages to get involved in. Monsters Inked is a huge exhibition
featuring world-renowned illustrators, and one lucky winner will have the chance to showcase their monster alongside these artists. Not only that but they’ll get their creation turned into a Moshi Monsters character that millions of children around the whole world can adopt.”

One overall winner, and 24 runners-up, will have their work framed and displayed at the Idea Generation Gallery for the duration of the Monsters Inked exhibition.  The competition is open to all players of Moshi Monsters, and to sign-up for free visit www.moshimonsters.com. Entries will be judged by a panel of top illustrators and must be received by the deadline of March 23rd.  For more details on how to enter this competition visit: www.moshimonsters.com/monsterdesign

Tutpup is a site where kids from around the world can play maths and spelling games against each other. It might sound a bit dry and boring, but five minutes on the site will assure you that it’s not.

Despite being slightly older than the target audience, I’ve been hooked on the site since last summer and have spent countless evenings engaged in cut-throat maths battles with friends.

We’ve been very impressed with the site that Paul Birch, Richard Taylor, and the team at Cominded built, and think there is a lot of potential synergy between Tutpup and Moshi Monsters.

At Mind Candy we strongly believe that kids learn best when having fun, and Tutpup is a great example of this. We’ve heard many tales of children who’ve struggled in traditional lessons, but excelled when put in front of Tutpup. The game gives them confidence, respect from their peers, and a powerful incentive to spend hours honing their maths and spelling skills outside of school. Most importantly it’s fun. Our brains reward us by releasing little chemical jolts of pleasure whenever we grok a new system, and this is a key part of what makes a game fun. Sadly those pleasurable jolts are few and far between when learning in a traditional classroom.

Improving maths and english skills through rapid fire multi-player puzzles games is just the tip of the iceberg. A game centric approach to education could transform how we teach our kids, and better prepare them for a world that is hugely different to the one that existed when curricula and teaching methods were originally laid down.

Game designers could teach educators a great deal about how to make learning more exciting and engaging for children. There are pioneers in this field that are making great headway already: Derek Robertson’s classroom studies with the Nintendo DS (Brain Training and Nintendogs) make fascianting reading, and Graham Brown-Martin’s new conference (Game Based Learning) is a must-attend for anyone interested in this area. Even Carol Voderman and David Cameron are joining the fun with an announcement on the front page of the Guardian today: “Her taskforce is to make maths more cheerful and populist on the Countdown model…”

One of my clearest memories from school was a game I spent several days trying to crack. We had one BBC Micro in the whole of our primary school and getting access to it was a real challenge. I became fascinated by a text based game where you played the role of an ice cream tycoon running a few vans at a seaside resort. In the morning phase of the game you checked a few variables such as the weather report and hotel occupancy, and then decided how many ice creams to buy from your wholesaler. It was a pretty simplistic game but it had such a major impact on me at a critical age that i’m sure helped sow the seed that eventually led to my becoming an entrepreneur. Games are certainly not idle entertainment.

Education has always been at the heart of Moshi Monsters (the game was originally to be called Puzzle Monsters), but we have to tread a very delicate line. There’s no doubt our playground buzz would diminish if kids viewed us as a straight education site. At the same time, we want to ensure there is real educational merit to playing the game so parents are comfortable letting their children spend time and money at the site. There are many kids websites on the internet but very few that marry education with fun in the way Moshi does, so maintaining this balance is vital for us.

We think the 60 second daily puzzle games that children play with their Monster strikes the right balance. The games test a wide range of important skills such as spatial awareness, logic, vocabulary and basic maths, but at the same time are fun to play because of the game elements (friendly feedback from your monster, recording top scores, rewards of the in-game currency etc).

We believe that Tutpup’s style of multi-player puzzle games will make Moshi Monsters even more fun for our users and intend to introduce similar style games to Moshi soon. Tutpup is our first acquisition and we are very aware that there is already a large audience happily playing the game in schools around the world. We want to assure this existing audience that we have no plans to close, charge for, or dramatically modify Tutpup, and if that situation changes we will make sure we give plenty of notice.

If you’re a fan of Tutpup (teacher, parent or child) then we’d love to hear your feedback and ideas on how we can improve it.

Happy Monstering (and Tutpuping)

After an amazing effort from the whole team here at Mind Candy, we’re pleased to announce Moshi Monsters has just launched the Moshi Membership, with some amazing new features!

Getting your very own Monstro City passport will allow you to cross the bridge and visit the Port, where you can shop for exclusive new and rare items, treat your monster to a makeover and shake the Rox trees – money really does grow on trees!

It’s been a lot of hard work and we’re thrilled to be able to share it with you all, and hope to see you over there soon.

It’s a worrying fact though that children seem to lose their unbridled imaginations as they get older and are worn down by the school system. Sir Ken Robinson gave a great talk on this subject at TED a few years back.

I stumbled across the following video recently and it really struck a chord. It features a 4 year old French girl telling an incredible story about baby monkeys lost in frightening trees, lions, monsters, ghosts, witches, potomuses and a tremendously bad mammoth.

I’m not sure if she plays Moshi Monsters but I’d love to read one her stories if she did ever find herself in Monstro City.

I hope she doesn’t lose her gift for telling stories as she gets older.

Once upon a time… from Capucha on Vimeo.

Yesterday evening several Mind Candies attended the 2008 BAFTA Children’s Awards, representing Moshi Monsters for its nomination in the Interactive category.

Hosted by Keith Chegwin and held at the Hilton Park Lane, the ceremony was a huge success, with celebrities including Dannii Minogue, Geri Halliwell, Gemma Arteton and The Chuckle Brothers all making an appearance.

Although sadly we were beaten to the BAFTA by Channel 4’s excellent Bow Street Runner, the judges described Moshi Monsters as “energetic, charming and polished”, which we’re thrilled about and we hope to be back next year for another chance.

We released the first wave of new puzzle cards all the way back in 2007 and ever since then we’ve been hard at work getting Moshi Monsters off the ground.

We always wanted to release wave two of the cards, and we’re ecstatic to let you know that we’re finally able to do it! That’s right, you can look forward to 86 never before seen puzzle cards, spread across the usual range of difficulties.

That’s not all though. To celebrate the release, we’re putting the boxes on sale at a hefty discount. They’ll be exclusively available tomorrow from Firebox at only £20 for a box of 36 packs.

This will also be your last chance to pick up wave 1 cards and you’ll only have a limited time to get the wave 2 boxes. If you want a piece of Perplex City, grab them while you can!

NB. The codes on wave 2 cards won’t work on We Love Puzzles, so you won’t get points for solving them. However, we will be releasing the solutions at some point in the future, so keep your eyes peeled.

As much as we’d love to bring back the Perplex City ARG, there are sadly no plans to do that in the short-term. We simply felt it would be far better to release these puzzle cards to our loyal fans rather than letting them gather dust in our warehouse. We Love Puzzles will be one of the best places to join in the discussions.

Have fun!

Over the upcoming Autumn half-term holiday – that’s 27th to 31st October – we’ll be giving away special Moshi Monsters prizes to any children who sign up for a new library card. 

If you live in Surrey, grab the kids and drop by. To find out more and see where your local library is, visit the council’s site.

In addition, both myself and our Community Director, Rebecca Newton have put forward panels for SXSW 2009. These panels can be viewed, and more importantly voted for, at the SXSW interactive panel picker at the links below. Help us out by checking out our panels and giving them a vote!

Playing To Learn – Educating Kids Through Gaming, Divinia Knowles
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1335

Everything in Moderation, Socializing in Excess, Rebecca Newton
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/838

Although no one can say that MCFC played the beautiful game particularly well (we lost pretty much every match to be honest!), it just goes to show that it is the taking part that really does count. Saying that, we hope to be back next season, fitter, stronger and more skillful than ever and maybe with a few new signings (see how far the boss’s transfer kitty goes!) we could be pushing for promotion next time!

Mind Candy FC would like to thank the refs and organisers at The Elms for the past 10 weeks.

Team: Marty “The Foreign Legion” Batten, Ryan “Chopper” Conway, Ben “Ghost-faced Thriller” Geliher, Michael “Gazelle” Smith, Chris “Guns” Hoyes, Steve “The Tank” Pocklington.

Last night was the MOO Summer Street Party, a night of free beer and wine, great food and as much MOO stuff as you could lay your hands on!

A lot of Mind Candies went to the event, held at the Vibe Bar on Brick Lane, where we met a whole range of people with similar interests.

With great weather, and a great turn out, the party was a big success and we all hope MOO will continue what is now becoming a tradition next year.

At 4pm we all sat down (well some had to stand or squish themselves round the table a bit) to a sumptuous spread of scones with clotted cream & jam, Victoria sponge and the utterly wonderful Battenberg cake. I even cut the crusts off the tuna sandwiches!

We sampled a selection of teas. The responses varied: ‘Lapsang’ – smoky, Assam – fruity and Dahjeeling – spicy, and I made everyone eat as much cake as possible! This should hopefully help everyone steam through their workload this afternoon before falling into a sugar slump later.

So, we were at @media 2008 last week. Marty and I had a couple of good days listening to a lot of very clever and interesting people talk about all sorts of things to do with design, data, communities and code libraries, to mention just a few!

Although most of the talks we went to were very informative, there were a few that stood out to me as an interface designer and developer and those were the talks from Jeff Veen (ex. Google, Adaptive Path) and James Box (Clearleft). I’ll talk about Jeff’s presentation first.

Jeff was talking about telling stories with data, about how to present reams of information in a more intelligent and useful way. This is something that was piqued my interest because in Moshi we have a lot of data present on the main HUD (and potentially it may fill up more as we add more features) so I was keen when designing the HUD to display these pieces of data in groups that would make the most sense in context. Now although Jeff was primarily speaking about visualising data from a more tabular source, the approach he talked about is still useful, because he emphasises that it’s not the raw data that’s important, it’s actually the story that data has to tell and how we as designers can help the user make sense of it.

In Moshi we’ve aimed to group related data into specific groups that should (hopefully!) makes sense to a child. As a result we have 3 main areas of interest. The top right section holds Moshi’s two core metrics in terms of your progress in the game, one being your level (based on the amount of experience earned in minigames and puzzles), the other being it’s Monstar rating, essentially how popular the monster is in the community. The side bar is all about your monster, it’s health, happiness, wealth and well-being, and you can even check out a little bit of it’s history if you click on the profile button. The final section is related to the room itself, how visitors rate it and how many visitors you’ve actually had in total. I think it’s a good start to quite a difficult problem, but as with everything in design there’s always more to do!

Talking about interface design for children, this is a major challenge we face with the design process at Mind Candy. None of us are children (well… ahem, no comment), but we have to make sure our interfaces work for them. I’m sure this is something we’ll no doubt explore at a later date on this blog, along with a bit more usability research, once we finally get a hold of a copy of Silverback!

This year saw a brilliant line up of speakers, headed up by Jeffrey Veen (Adaptive Path, Google) first thing Thursday morning chatting about designing your way through data, data visualization and how incorporating users into our practice of user experience – and yes, that is taken directly from the sessions booklet :-). Veen lead the redesign of Google Analytics and managed the web apps UX team.

Tom Cartwright and Clare Roberts took us through the new BBC homepage and spoke about various odds and ends they come across during its development. This project took 3 client side devs and 2 software engineers 3 months and is of course ongoing. One interesting thing they mentioned was that they are currently using JQuery, which is what we use here, but due to JQuery dropping support for Safari 2 they are developing their own library – Glow, so will have to keep an eye on that. They also explained how they got their static image requests more than halved by using CSS Sprites and the Sliding Door techniques – pretty simple stuff really but none the less stuff that I never thought of myself, (apart from simple rollovers) of having 1 big image containing more than a dozen separate images that are simply positioned within the CSS. Simple but very cool. You can check out the beta site here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/.

James Box from Clearleft, Brighton showcased edenbee.com – a new community for people to tackle climate change – nice looking site and up to the usual Clearleft standard.

We also attended a chat about up and coming HTML5 and all that it will offer us from James Graham and Lachlan Hunt, again this was interesting – nothing was mentioned about XHTML2 apart from: HTML5 = Evolution, XHTML2 = Revolution, but I think they will both offer good and bad things. In the end a mixture of the 2 seems a good bet. If you fancy nerding out you can read more about whats in and whats out here: http://xhtml.com/en/future/x-html-5-versus-xhtml-2/. I am going to look more into HTML5 over the next while and thanks to Opera – which I think leads in support, try a few things out!

Dan Rubin of Sidebar Creative fame took us through some design techniques – some may argue this was pretty much Photoshop 101 but it can never be a bad thing to brush up on skills. Seeing more designing with grids was also good.

Andy Clarke took it a step further with his chat “Underpants Over My Trousers” – I love hearing Andy’s talks and this was another awesome session. In this session we learnt how Andy applied his passion for comics to almost everything as well as with his design for a Puerto Rican newspaper of all things.

John Resig, author of the JQuery Javascript library gave us the run down on all the different libraries out there at the moment and features they each offer.

The first day panel was good, discussing things from design workflow, scrums and sprints and how designers fit into this space along with current trends in web design.

Overall the event this year surpassed expectations and I took a lot away from it. I’m looking forward to next year – but maybe not as many drinks on the Thursday evening ;-)

@media Flickr pool.

Andy Budd has spoken about Clearleft’s new application, Silverback – if you have not heard of Silverback, its used for usability testing. Can’t wait to see this in action – hopefully we can get our hands on it soon.

Oh, and by the way – the icon by Hicks Design is killer!

Check out the Silverback website.

We have a new widget for Facebook and Bebo which lets your monster greet friends as they visit your profile, using information from your networks to personalise things.

There is also the new ratings system where visitors to your room can give it a rating between 1 and 5 stars, boosting your Monstar Rating within the community, and hopefully nudging you one step closer to that elusive A-rating! (while we’re on the subject, my room is over here :D).

Although we’re now open to the public, we’re a long way from being completely finished, there are lots of new features on the horizon, and we’d love to hear any feedback you have!

As always, all the latest Moshi news can be found on the Daily Growl at http://www.moshimonsters.com/community/blog/, so check it out!

The event was really fascinating in many ways. The widgiverse as I now know it’s called seems to be like the web in it’s earliest form. Everyone wants to be there, lots of people have no idea why they want to be there – but are just doing stuff in a flag planting exercise – and a whole load of people are asking about the money.There are definitely some very smart ideas though, and this time round there are better and richer statistics about useage and true demographics.

There was a great talk from Ankur Shah from Techlightenment about the current state of play and the importance of the social graph in understanding the use of your widget and on making the widget more compelling and integrated for users. It was also great to see Ivan Pope expounding on his vision for where widgets are going and about the decentralisation of data. As someone who has to constantly think about storing vast amounts of data and scalability, I personally love the idea that your data is held in little connected pools in different locations and is then mashed up as you want it through the tools and widgets you choose. The experience of the mashup event, when taken in conjunction with the recent O’Reilly report on Facebook apps, gives you a lot of insights into how, what and why users want from widgets. 

Our main reason for being at Mashup and being there mob handed (Jack, Jey, Mike, Divinia and I) was to show off the prototype of our little monster widget. The widget’s now on our community page and is also available for you to add on Facebook and Bebo, with MySpace not far behind. It’s in its infancy and we’re working on much more integration with the social networking sites and soon we’ll hopefully be doing some fun bidirectional stuff soon. Let us know as always what you think of the widget, we’ve got some ideas but it’d be great to hear yours.

For anyone interested in the widgiverse, it looks like Ivan’s WidgetWebExpo will be a pretty cool gathering out in New York in June.

Last night Dr Byron’s whistlestop tour of TV studios and select committee hearings was suspended for a night at BAFTA, at an event run by BAFTA and Showcomotion. She was in conversation with Marc Goodchild of the BBC and went through chapters of the review in a Q&A with the audience. I have to confess that before I’d read the report I only knew of Tanya Byron through her TV work, and didn’t know of her scientific or high-flying medical background, and like a fellow audience member had been concerned about the integrity of the report’s methods and findings. Mea culpa. What came out of last night and from looking at the report for the last few days, and looking at the research commissioned to go with it was a feeling of a very well structured, intellectual, research exercise and consultation. I’d have loved to have been involved in the consultation exercise but at the early stages of that process we were getting Moshi Monsters into private beta and also working on getting our COPPA approval/CARU safe harbor and there just wouldn’t have been time for both.

The review was the result of 100 stake holder meetings and many other activities, it “put children at the heart of the thinking” and sought to be balanced in what is a “polarized and emotional debate”. Fascinatingly there were more responses from children than there were from adults (including all industry consultation). For it’s thinking, the report delves into the fields of neuroscience, educational psychology and child development. The talk last night showed Dr Byron’s passion for her role and what a great job they’ve done, for once at these events I could have listened for a lot longer.

The review concentrates on harm as not just “content” but also contact and conduct. These are all things we’ve been thinking about as we’ve been building Moshi and have placed report buttons everywhere and put the children in charge of moderating their own messages and reporting issues.

The review places a lot of onus on the industry to educate parents about what their children are doing and places an equal if not greater responsibility on parents to discuss with their children what they are doing and to close the “digital divide”. A lot of emphasis is also placed on the fact that we are now “living in a risk averse culture and children are deprived of experiences which will help their development due to this obsession with risk”. One great analogy which is in the review and mentioned in the talk is that of swimming pools. Children need to learn to swim in a controlled environment to prepare them for the risk of drowning in later life in the real world.

“A useful analogy here would be to think about how we manage risks related to public swimming pools. Here we have an area open to the public because it affords many benefits. But swimming pools have a number of safety measures in place to in order to manage the risks (e.g. of injury, drowning):

There are clear safety information signs around the pool area that advise on appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.

There are swimming aids available for younger or the less confident swimmers (e.g. water wings, rubber rings, floats).

There are different pool areas – shallow for those that need to stand and are less confident at swimming all the way to deeper waters for confident swimmers and divers.

There are lifeguards who can assist swimmers (of all levels of competency) in trouble, signal to those who
are behaving in a risky manner, respond to complaints about swimmers’ behaviour, and even ask them to leave the pool if warnings are not heeded.

There are fences, doors, locks and alarms to prevent access to the pool area when it would be unsafe to go in.”

I feel it’s been a really positive report for the industry and overall a positive week in the arena kid’s online safety in the UK. I’m looking forward to seeing the next steps and how the proposed “UK Council on Child Internet Safety” works with the industry. It’s unheard of that the government accepts all the recommendations of a review such as this and it’s a big testament to Dr Byron and her team and process.

Amongst the various presenters, three Mind Candies took the stage to present their own short talks on a variety of topics.

James led us down the tech avenue with his talk on the infamous Halting Problem, resulting in a mini debate between members of the audience regarding quantum computing and the P=NP Problem.

Next up was Alastair with his talk entitled “Sonarboria: A Walk Through the Forest of Generative Music”, which delved into the realm of algorithmic composition of music, and included an impressive live demonstration of the techniques.

Dr. Mike continued the generative music theme with his talk entitled “The Generation Game” which also touched on the philosophical side of automatic composition, sparking a discussion on whether computers will ever truly be capable of injecting “feeling” into music.

With a variety of other talks including poetry, glitch aesthetics, synthesisers, APIs, and game design the evening proved to be a real success, ending with the first UK gig of The Tenorions, the first Tenori-On band in the world.

Wellcome Collection
183 Euston Road
London, England NW1 2BE
United Kingdom
+44 20 7611 2222

It should be an interesting event with other speakers from Pixel-lab, Nik Nak Games and Harbottle & Lewis. Drop the organisers a line if you would like to go along!

Just a quick line to say I’ll be speaking at the next Insync event “Keeping up with the kids” on Wednesday night. Sounds like a fun night, hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

It’s a collection of talks and a workshops around cross-media entertainment for kids. Sadly it’s on the same night as Sandpit, but their games are now fully booked and you’d be far better off at Insync.

I’ll post a quick trip report on Thursday.

Last autumn, I was asked to speak down in Brighton and met Jayne Kirkham who is a great advocate for an organisation called Save Kids TV and I’ve been meaning to write about their campaign ever since.

Those of us who grew up in the Postgate-era (Clangers, Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, Mr Ben etc) loved the wide variety of home grown TV and have totally taken kids TV for granted. It happened for us and I think we’ve all assumed it’ll be just as great for our kids. Talk of the absence of home grown TV sounds a bit “Daily Mail” at first, however I like many people think it’s vital for there to be a balance of kids TV which reflects back the environment kids are growing up in. Grange Hill, though less scenic in so many ways, was far more relevant to my generation then Beverly Hills 90210 and any pertinent issues it dealt with were more easily comprehended and talked about.

The current statistic is that only 1% of new programmes currently shown on UK kids TV are made in the UK with the current levels of funding – a frighteningly small percentage that’s likely to decrease over time. The death of this sector of the UK creative industry would be a great loss and would have a huge knock-on impact in the UK online kids space through brain drain, lack of cross-pollination and absence of unique IP from the UK to create online experiences to accompany.

Those of you who feel concerned about this do have a voice though, there’s a petition on the 10 Downing Street website.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/

Check out our Mind Candy panels and get voting for us!

• Casual Multi-Player Online Games: Serious Revenues
• Gaming and Tweens: The Kids are Alright!
• Community & Loyalty: Gamers to Flamers, Lurkers to Workers

Moshi Monsters

We’re trying to work out what it means, maybe it relates to this?

What the Hell Is a Moshi Monster?