Roald Dahl’s Imaginormous Challenge
Inspiring the next generation of creative minds with the world’s number one storyteller
I’ve been lucky enough to work with the Roald Dahl Story Company since 2015. This has been a childhood dream come true. But without a doubt, the highlight has been creating Roald Dahl’s Imaginormous Challenge.
Until 2016, the Roald Dahl Story Company sponsored an annual literature prize. It was well regarded within the industry – but outside of that, no one really knew of it. It was time to rethink how the prize worked.
According to education experts, such as Ken Robinson, children in Britain and the US are in the midst of a creativity crisis. The Imaginormous Challenge was created to be part of the solution. Our aim was to help unleash a child's creativity – inspired by the world famous imagination of Roald Dahl.
“Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves”
Roald Dahl's Imaginormous Challenge launched in 2017. Working with Scholastic, we distributed 250,000 idea packs to school children across America.
We didn’t want this to be a traditional story writing competition. Our goal was to help every child to unleash their creativity. So taking part was designed to be as easy and inclusive as possible.
Inspired by Roald Dahl’s own creative process, all a child has to do is share a story idea in 100 words or less. Ideas weren’t judged on spelling, handwriting or grammar. Just pure imagination.
We also wanted it to be about more than storytelling. Not only can a great idea come from anyone, but it can go anywhere too. That's why each year we select a handful of ideas to transform into something weird and wonderful, other than a story. So far this has included:
A theatrical performance by the cast of ‘ Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’
A custom toy created by Warner Bros toy designers
A movie scene filmed at Warner Bros studio
A Minecraft world created by lead Minecraft designers
An original candy creation by Dylan Candy
In its first two years, Roald Dahl’s Imaginormous Challenge has helped spark over 100,000 young creative minds – with many more to come. In 2019, the Imaginormous Challenge will also run in South Africa. France, India and Australia.
Our ultimate goal is to help inspire a million new story ideas worldwide by 2025. With that in mind, here is one of my favourite story ideas to date:
Brady makes an unusual friend named Bang Bang Bingo Bingo Bong Bong—or “Sound” for short because he is a Sound. You can’t see or touch Sound, but he can make any sound you could imagine! Sound plays tricks on Brady’s Auntie Kimberly, like making a door knocking sound (which confuses Auntie when no one’s at the door) and squeaking “please don’t eat me” when Auntie picks up an orange. Sound gets in a bit of trouble with his tricks, but becomes a hero when he makes a police siren sound to stop a robbery at the ice cream store!”
