Ángel Fernández

Director del Departamento de Materiales Interactivos

Anaya Educación

SPAIN

Email: angelf@anaya.es

1994, First Septs in Multimedia.

Since 1995, the Interactive Materials Departament of Anaya Educacion have been developping multimedia materials, both in CD-ROM and on the Internet.

The main objetive was to become a self-producer work-group, due to its previous activivity as a Systems Department. The main computer installation in Grupo Anaya was mainteined by this group since 1988, taking care of all the aspects of what was called desktop publishing. Once all the users were formed in their main jobs (that was, to produce printed products using computers), our Systems Department was becoming, step by step, in what we are now: the only group in Anaya doing their own mutimedia products. This group was composed, in the begining, by people with experience in desktop publishing solutions, but without any previous experience in developping programs neither in programming languages. In spite of, we started trying to build little educationals prototypes, staying at the office in non working hours. So, we showed the directors of our company little examples of future multimedia educational programms, that should be accompaning our books.

Soon, our first opportunity was in front of us: an european project, aided by the European Comission, was aimed to build a multimedia program for kids, to help understanding and recognizing the main animals and plants of our planet. That was the first step of our first product: Explorama©.

Explorama©, the first educational multimedia program in Spain

With the help of the European Comission, we started to think on a methaphor, the first idea we needed to start the project. Using a toy for children (and watching our own kids playing), we realize that the best way to study, classify and recognize animals and plants was travelling on a special spaceship throughout the planet. Using a very intuitive interface, the little children (the program was intended to be used by 6 years aged kids) will visit the main habitats, wachting, collecting, clasifying and even coloring each animal and plant shown there.

After a huge amount of nights spent at the office, we presented Explorama© at the Frankurt Book Fair in 1994 -by these years the fair was begining to be called "The fair of books and software"-, getting a very possitive approval. The program was built in three different languages (spanish, english and german), and was one of the first multiplattform CD's, that is, working in both Macintosh and Windows Computers.

1995: The Systems Department become the Interactive Materials Department

Once Explorama© was in the market, a entirely new project was asked by the direction of the company. For the first time, we had the opportunity to choose and design a new multimedia program for children.

And we choose literature for children. We wanted to show that using computers was not against reading, and the liking of reading. We wanted to demonstrate that multimedia PC could be another useful tool to learn and have fun, and not only using shooting games. And with this purpose, we started to design what later was called as "The Happy Prince and The Story WorkShop©". As we had the important experience creating Explorama©, we started first designing completely all the aspects of the program, not usign our computers until all the design was finished.

The Happy Prince and the WorkShop: we become famous.

The main objetives of the program were two:

· To present the children a classical work in children universal literature: a tale from Oscar Wilde.

· To allow the chidren to build their own stories, using a very intuitive and easy tool.

We wanted to add some aditional value to the type of multimedia standard: the living books. So, we built the complete animated story of The Happy Prince, adding some important elements: hidden animations, five different languages, and five complete diccionaries of all the written words appearing on the programm.

We had some problems getting the approval, due to the general thinking that children prefer comic stories, and The Happy Prince was a very sad tale (I disagreed from the beginning). Finally, we get the approval to create the program, and we started to do it very enthusiastically.

Apart from the animated story, we spent a lot of time designing the story workshop, the tool that will allow the chidren to build their own tales. That tool needed to be very easy to use, and at the same time, with many possibilities of backgrounds, characters, text, music and sounds.

In fact, we will tell a story to the children, and they will tell a story to us.

We took also advantage of our design, to present an interactive information of the author -in this case, Oscar Wilde-, and to know more data about his life and other books.

A year later, our program was finished. We felt very proud of our job, but also frightened about its acceptance. We present it to the National Möebius Award (the most important spanish and portuguese award for multimedia projects), just with the intention to learn from the rest of the presented products. And we won the prize!. That was a very happy approval for our department, and we won also the chance of participating in the International Möbius Award, to be celebrated in Paris, in September 1996. We were going to have the opportunity to analize what other companies were developping in terms of multimedia products.

And, as the Oscars in Hollywood, the speaker said "and in the multimedia educational category, the prize goes to.... The Happy Prince, Anaya, Spain....".

Wining the prize, and taking advantage of our presence in press and specialized magazines, we started to work full time as the Interactive Materials Department in Anaya Educación.

Two more titles with the same interface design are now on the market: The Emperor's new clothes & the Story WorkShop and Androcles and the lion & the Story WorkShop. These are the three products of the Interactive Classical Tales Collection.

1997, we go crazy with Internet.

Once The Happy Prince was in the market, we started to show the programm in schools, congress and educational meetings. And we soon realize that children understood the program much better that adults -kids started to create their stories without any question-. They began to save their stories on their computers, in order to show them to their families and friends.

Meanwhile, we were working on the second title (taking advantage of all the previous design and programming), and making our first steps in a new enviroment: the Internet. And we did ourselves an important question:

· How we could see the stories that children were creating with our program?

· What could we do to allow a kid from any part of the world to create and show his stories to any other kid?

We found the answer in what it is, in my opinion, the most important social communication phenomenon of the human history: The Internet.

In Spain, people navigating through Internet in 1997 were very few. And, what was worse for us, this new communication model will take new methods, new business models to the standard of publishing. And the standard publishing industry began to see the Internet as a enemy, not as the new and huge opportunity.

We prepared a prototype, using very few examples being on the Internet, in order to show our directors the new enviroment, and the need to reflect in depth on the subject. Our company was known as an "educational services enterprise", and the Internet was the most important opportunity to begin offering services, not only products.

So, we started by our own to build an Internet service for children. The Internet was very powerful, useful and interesting, but everything there was in english, and the programms (the browsers) were very difficult to use, and very far from what we know as a look and feel interface.

Children from all the spanish speaking universe will take advantage of all this wonderful enviroment. All we had to do is to take advantage of all the important social aspects, and creating special interfaces to be easy to use.

We used to write in the cover of our text books something that was the key for us:

Learning is sharing,

Learning is participating,

Learning is discovering,

Learning is having fun.

Anaya Educación, our company, had the proper tool to make this statements true: building an Internet service for all the spanish speaking children of the world. Using the Internet, you could share, your could participate, you could discover, and you could have fun learning.

With all of these purposes, we started to build our internet servive for children: La Aventura Educativa.

La Aventura Educativa: the internet service for children.

The main objetives of the begining steps were focused on showing the people inside the company a new way to offer not only products, but services. So, we tried to explain adults with non previous experience on the Internet (in fact, with any idea of what was all of it) in the same way as if they were children.

We tried to include in the new service all the important elements we discovered:

· A mail system very easy to use will allow the children to share information, hobbies, and making new friends.

· A conference system will allow the children not only to consume information, but also to produce information and to share it with the rest of people.

· A virtual library will allow us to publish practical information to be consulted, as the dictionaries, manuals, maps, etc.

· A virtual kiosk will help us to show a very important difference publishing on the Internet: the information had to be permanently reviewed, refreshed and updated.

· A virtual funfair will allow us to include progressively new little programs with educational purposes

· A virtual museum will allow children to show their paintings, handwork, etc.

With all of these previous ideas, we started to publish the service, and started also to look for and explain the key that even now everybody is looking for: Where is the money?

For us, since the first html code we wrote, the revenues for our company will be brought by the capability of being the most important reference in terms of Internet educational services in Spanish. But things in Spain were very dark in terms of Internet business (and they remain the same now).

From a country with only one company offering telecommunications services (the monopoly of Telefónica de España), we passed to a completely different scenario: a lot of new companies fighting for the phone market, the movil-phone market, and the Internet market. In only two years, our country had been divided into a variety of phone companies, offering free Internet conections, and telling us that they are the really gate to the Internet.

Meanwhile, Anaya Educación started to look for a partner among these companies to share the needed investments to offer La Aventura Educativa to everyone, and trying to share also their future and hypothetical revenues.

1999: Internet and the new industry standards.

In the last three years, Internet have been the eternal promise for all the publishing and communications industry. Meanwhile the revenues for the communications enterprises are very clear (consuming connection time), the rest of the industry -what it is called the content providers-, is just waiting for an interesting offer of joint-venture. They know the have the content, but they don't know yet how to make it profitable. If the advertising is not the answer (at least, not the hole answer), content providers are using the Internet -in the best cases- just as a marketing tool for their clients. They understand the Internet only as a tool to improve their traditional business, not as a new way to create new business.

So, what is the future for our service?

If we don't find a partner to share the needs of investment, La Aventura Educativa, the first completely Internet service for spanish-speaking children, will be unfortunately closed, and our dreams of "changing the world" (as the genius Steve Jobs used to say), will be postponed with no date.

Please find enclosed some marketing informations about our two jobs:

The Interactive Classical Tales collection of CD-ROM's

La Aventura Educativa: the Internet Service for Children.