 Steve, the host, presents the audience with a puzzle involving Blue, the animated dog ... To help the audience unlock the puzzle, Blue leaves behind a series of clues, which are objects marked with one of her paw prints. In between the discovery of the clues, Steve plays a series of games—mini-puzzles—with the audience that are thematically related to the overall puzzle ... As the show unfolds, Steve and Blue move from one animated set to another, jumping through magical doorways, leading viewers on a journey of discovery, until, at the end of the story, Steve returns to the living room. There, at the climax of the show, he sits down in a comfortable chair to think—a chair known, of course, in the literal world of Blue's Clues, as the Thinking Chair. He puzzles over Blue's three clues and attempts to come up with the answer. In 1993, Nickelodeon assigned a team of its own producers to create a new television program in the US for young children, using research on early childhood education and the viewing habits of preschoolers. Their goal was to invent a children's television program that would "empower preschoolers to learn through active participation in activities that are grounded in their everyday lives, to redefine the approach to problem-solving for preschoolers in an engaging manner. The producers, Todd Kessler, Angela Santomero and Traci Paige Johnson (whom Brown Johnson, executive creative director at Nickelodeon, called a "green creative team"), were influenced by Sesame Street but wanted to utilize research performed during the 30 years since it debuted. "We wanted to learn from Sesame Street and take it one step further," Angela Santomero said. Based on research of theorists such as Daniel Anderson of the University of Massachusetts (who served as a consultant for Blue's Clues), the producers set out to develop a show that took advantage of children being intellectually and behaviorally active when watching television. Research since Sesame Street changed how attention span in young children was perceived. Sesame Street was developed with the understanding that children have short attention spans, so the show was designed in a magazine-like format, in which each episode was made up of a variety of segments. Until then, children's educational television programs presented their content in a one-way conversation, but Blue's Clues revolutionized the genre by inviting their viewers' involvement. Its creators believed that if children were more involved in the action of what they were viewing, they would attend to its content longer than previously expected, up to a half hour, and learn more. They also dropped the traditional magazine format for a narrative format. "... The choice for Blue's Clues became to tell one story, beginning to end, camera moving left-to-right like reading a storybook, transitions from scene to scene as obvious as the turning of a page." Every episode of Blue's Clues was structured in this way. Its pace was deliberate and its material was presented clearly. One way this was done was in the use of pauses—"long enough to give the youngest time to think, short enough for the oldest not to get bored." The production of Blue's Clues was upon research that showed that television could be a "powerful educational agent" because for most American children, it was an accessible medium and a "powerful cultural artifact". Since television programs tell stories through pictures, the potential for episodic learning was high. Television, using film techniques, was able to present information from multiple perspectives, in a variety of "real world" contexts (i.e., situations within the daily experiences of young children), and that television could be an effective method of scientific education for young children. The creators wanted to provide their viewers with more "authentic learning opportunities" by placing problem-solving tasks in the context of storytelling techniques, by slowly increasing the difficulty of these tasks, and by inviting their direct involvement. The show's creators encouraged participation with their use of repetition. At first, Nickelodeon aired the same episode daily for five days before showing the next one. In field tests, the attention and comprehension of young viewers increased with each repeated viewing. Repetition was built into the structure of each episode; for example, "in an episode called 'Blue's Predictions,' the show's human host, Joe, says some variation of the word 'predict' around 15 times." |
