Digital Maker Kits

  • Year: 2015
  • Project Type: Interactive Learning / Games
  • Role: Producer
  • Company: Aardman / BBC

The Digital Maker kits were a suite of digital learning tools built for the BBC’s Make It Digital campaign in the 2010s.

The theory was that, in the not too distant future, kids will need to learn more digital skills for building technology, and that actual coding might take a back seat to more node based creation tools.

We were tasked with building an extensible, HTML5 based, node system that could create not just games, but other forms of media as well. I believe we made nine or ten different versions in the end, with game makers, music visualisers, story creators, and more. Brands included Doctor Who, BBC Introducing, Eastenders, Children in Need.

My favourite version were the music visualiser (as working with Stefan Goodchild on this was what inspired me to start my generative art journey), and the Children in Need game maker, as every level that was made with that became part of a single, interconnected game, where players could play through all the user submitted maps.