More about Twirlywoos

The following is a conference paper I gave at undergraduate level, which covers the principles behind the programme in a bit more detail.

Today I would like to discuss educational applications of animation, and how animation can be used to enhance the intellectual development of pre-school children.

I will be illustrating these ideas by referring to Twirlywoos, which is a stop-motion animated series broadcast on CBeebies. Officially the programme is aimed at an audience of three-to-four-year-olds, (Graff 2015) although speaking from personal experience, it is very popular with children much younger than that. The series focuses on a family of bird-like characters named Great Big Hoo, Toodloo, Chickedy and Chick, who explore the world of humans with the same curiosity and naivety as the young audience. Let's watch a short clip which introduces the programme.

Twirlywoos was first broadcast in 2015 and as I speak [May 2017], production on the second season is just ending. The stop-motion animation is produced locally at Mackinnon and Saunders in Altrincham, directed by Barry Purves, but the concept and scripts are developed by Ragdoll Productions, which since 1984 has been producing children's programmes such as Teletubbies, Rosie and Jim, Tots TV and In the Night Garden. (Ragdoll Productions 2017: Our Story)

The founder of Ragdoll, Anne Wood, worked as a secondary school teacher and editor of an educational magazine before moving into television (Ragdoll Productions 2017: In the Beginning). She found herself devoted to the development of young children through imagination, (ibid.) and according to the company website, she "could see no reason why children's TV should not be of the same quality as a good children's book" (Ragdoll Productions 2017: Our People). All of Ragdoll's programming has had a consistent focus on learning through curiosity and playfulness, but Twirlywoos has been their first attempt to convey this message through animation rather than puppets or live-action.

Each episode of Twirlywoos is scripted with the assistance of Cathy Nutbrown, a professor in the University of Sheffield's School of Education. Her research has indicated that the way toddlers learn is through what she calls "schemas," or what we might call an obsession with a certain topic. For example, she says, children might go through a period of being obsessed with the idea of "round and round," and they will want to spin round in circles, draw circles or round shapes, play with toys that are round or have wheels, enjoy rolling out pastry or playdough, or be fascinated with the wheels on vehicles (Nutbrown 2015).

These schemas are how small children make sense of the world around them, where they are constantly faced with something new, exciting, or maybe even overwhelming. Schemas are nearly always based on a simple physical movement: round and round, up and down, here and there, and as a child develops, they will combine schemas together in order to understand more complicated concepts.

According to Nutbrown, it is very important for parents and pre-school teachers to notice these schemas, encourage the child's interest, and provide them with opportunities to investigate the topic in question, in order to enhance and accelerate the child's intellectual development (ibid) For example, if a child is obsessed with "round and round" and is encouraged to make this kind of circular marks on paper, this will eventually lead to the child being interested in learning how to write the letters of the alphabet (Twirlywoos 2017).

Each episode of Twirlywoos is designed to focus on one particular schema. First it aims to catch the child's attention through audio-visual cues, then teach them a little about the topic through repeated scenarios, and finally to encourage them with opportunities to re-enact what they have seen on screen. Let's have a look at a clip from Episode 3, which conveniently enough, is named "Round and Round".

As you can see, although the characters are animated, the programme uses green-screen technology to place them into a real-world environment. In every episode, the Twirlywoos visit an environment which would be recognizable to a small child, (Ragdoll Productions 2017: Our Shows: Twirlywoos). In the clip we've just seen, for example, it's a playground. This not only helps to make the concept more relatable or understandable, but it encourages the child to mimic what they have seen on screen the next time they are in that environment.

There is a very specific use of music and sound effects in each episode, in order to draw the child's attention to the central theme (Twirlywoos 2017). If we look back at the clip we have just watched, you will notice that the soundtrack is mostly silent when there is no "round and round" movement, but when the roundabout spins, you hear it squeaking loudly, and music starts. This is so that the movement, and the schema, seems more enticing and interesting to the child.

Each episode is also heavy on repetition. This serves two purposes: the first is obviously to reinforce the idea of the schema, but it is also so that the child can start to predict what might happen next (CBeebies Grown-ups 2015), thereby developing their understanding of cause and effect. In an interview, Anne Wood has noted that children like to feel that they are "experts" on a topic, and will often talk while they are watching, either explaining to their parents what is happening, or trying to warn the characters on screen about what will happen next, and in order to encourage this behaviour, there is very minimal use of dialogue in the programme, to allow the children plenty of opportunity to speak. (ibid). The developers of the programme have found that children enjoy what they are watching more when they can predict what will happen next: this enjoyment gives them more confidence in their reasoning skills (Ragdoll Productions 2017: Our Shows: Twirlywoos).

The medium of animation is particularly suited to providing repetition, as every element of the environment and soundtrack can be controlled, to ensure that things play out exactly the same way (although the director has stressed to me that he would never dream of cutting corners by looping animation, every single repetition is animated from scratch!)

As with most animated products aimed at small children, there is a huge amount of Twirlywoos merchandise available. This is first and foremost a financial necessity, given that the BBC only funds 25 percent of the programme's budget (Plunkett 2015), however it also has the benefit of allowing children to re-enact what they have seen on screen, thereby reinforcing the learning. As you can see in this image, the fact that Twirlywoos is a stop-motion animation allows the toys to be very similar in appearance and texture to the on-screen characters. Anne Wood has noted that the tactility of stop-motion is hugely important to the programme (Graff 2015) and the merchandise therefore adds another sense - the sense of touch - to the learning experience.

In every episode, after the Twirlywoos have had an adventure in the real world, they return to their ship, where they receive a visitor, who reinforces the theme of the episode. This visitor is often a toy of some sort, which allows the child to recreate the scenario with their own toys. In the "round and round" episode, the visitor is the "stop-go car". Let's have a little look ...

[Clip: S01E03 "Round and Round", from 7:45 to 9:00 minutes. Unfortunately this is no longer available online.]

Aside from the points I have already mentioned, something else you might have picked up from that clip is the limited and deliberate use of language. And there has in fact been research into child development which indicates that animation is a particularly useful medium to teach children the meaning of certain vocabulary such as verbs and prepositions.

In a 2008 experiment by Mineo et al, children in three age groups (3, 4 and 5 years old) were asked to identify action verbs using a variety of different sources: video, animated stick figures based upon motion capture of real-life movements, and static drawings. They found that in every age group, children were more successful at naming the actions when presented with the animated stick figures. (Schlosser et al 2014: 1780).

A similar experiment in 2011 by Fujisawa et al used pictographic symbols, both static and animated, and found that children were much more able to identify verbs and prepositions if the symbols were animated. (Schlosser et al 2014: 1781)

However, a third experiment by Schlosser et al in 2011, which used much more detailed images in static and animated forms, found that animation did not significantly help the children to understand and identify verbs and prepositions. (ibid)

My understanding from the results of these experiments is that animation can be a useful tool to help children to understand vocabulary, but only if the imagery is clear, simple and unambiguous.

The action presented in Twirlywoos is very clearly and deliberately staged in order to make the meaning of the words understandable. In personal conversation, the director informed me that every scene reaches him incredibly tightly storyboarded, almost to the frame, to ensure that every movement the characters make is readable to the young audience. Particularly on the "ship" environment, the simple rounded shapes and bright primary colours of the characters stand out very clearly against the plain white background, making their movements as clear as possible. Together with the narrator repeating the words "round and round" throughout the episode, this reinforces the vocabulary time and time again, ensuring the development of the children's language comprehension.

Even the names of the characters have been planned out to aid children's language development. Great Big Hoo, Toodloo, Chickedy and Chick. As Anne Wood notes, the names have "a certain rhythm and a certain sort of alliteration" which mimics the sounds found in the English language. Throughout every episode, the characters are constantly saying their own names, and clearly the intention is for the children to mimic them, and thereby working on their speech skills.

To conclude, although no formal study has yet been carried out to determine the educational benefits (if any) of Twirlywoos, I do believe that the programme is a perfect illustration of the fact that it is possible to combine animation with peer-reviewed research into the theory of child development in order to create a product which is thoroughly and rigorously designed to supplement and enhance a child's learning experience. I do hope that more animated programmes are developed along the same lines, in order to ensure that animation becomes an active, educational experience for pre-school children.

Bibliography

CBEEBIES GROWN-UPS, 2015. "Introducting Twirlywoos: Anne Wood and Professor Cathy Nutbrown" BBC [online]. Available from http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/cbeebiesgrownups/entries/90b9a71e-f6f6-499f-b38f-12ed43cfc2d4 [Accessed 1 May 2017]

GRAFF, Vincent, 2015. "Teletubbies creator Anne Wood introduces CBeebies' new stars: the Twirlywoos," Radio Times [online]. Available from http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-02-23/teletubbies-creator-anne-wood-introduces-cbeebies-new-stars-the-twirlywoos [Accessed 1 May 2017]

NUTBROWN, Cathy, 2015, "Schemas and Young Children's Learning" University of Sheffield [online]. Available from http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.441757!/file/Schemas.pdf [Accessed 1 May 2017]

PLUNKETT, John, "Eh-oh! Teletubbies creator warns of funding crisis as kids' TV goes retro". The Guardian [online]. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/19/teletubbies-twirlywoos-anne-wood-childrens-tv [Accessed 1 May 2017]

RAGDOLL PRODUCTIONS, 2017 "In the Beginning" [online]. Available from http://www.ragdoll.co.uk/in-the-beginning/ [Accessed 1 May 2017]

RAGDOLL PRODUCTIONS, 2017 "Our People" [online]. Available from http://www.ragdoll.co.uk/our-people/ [Accessed 1 May 2017]

RAGDOLL PRODUCTIONS, 2017 "Our Shows: Twirlywoos" [online]. Available from http://www.ragdoll.co.uk/our-shows/twirlywoos/ [Accessed 1 May 2017]

RAGDOLL PRODUCTIONS, 2017 "Our Story" [online]. Available from http://www.ragdoll.co.uk/our-story/ [Accessed 1 May 2017]

RAGDOLL PRODUCTIONS, 2015 "Meet the Twirlywoos" [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDeUy9RHExo [Accessed 1 May 2017]

RAGDOLL PRODUCTIONS, 2015 "Round and Round: Spinning Very Fast" [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUGfZm_mTbM [Accessed 1 May 2017]

RAGDOLL PRODUCTIONS, 2016 "S01E03 Round and Round" [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePX5mLh16kI [Accessed 1 May 2017]

SCHLOSSER, Ralf W. et al, 2014, "Effects of Animation on Naming and Identification Across Two Graphic Symbol Sets Representing Verbs and Prepositions". Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, Vol 57, October 2014. Available online from http://jslhr.pubs.asha.org [Accessed 5 April 2017]

TWIRLYWOOS, 2017 "About the Show: Educational Value" [online]. Available from http://www.twirlywoos.com/grown-ups/about/educational-values [Accessed 1 May 2017]