Letting Young Minds Run Wild
If you had told eight-year-old me that I would get to work on Roald Dahl one day, I would not have believed you.
Growing up, I was obsessed with his stories, from The BFG and The Twits to Matilda and George’s Marvellous Medicine. The last one actually got me into quite a lot of trouble at school.
So it felt slightly surreal that, between 2015 and 2020, I got to work regularly with the Roald Dahl Story Company on an unusually varied collection of projects. Everything from a new brand identity to a passive-aggressive Christmas present for Steven Spielberg.
There was also the Roald Dahl restaurant we very nearly launched in Covent Garden. If we ever meet, and I am in a sufficiently stable emotional state, I will tell you all about it.
But on a brighter note, I did create Roald Dahl’s Imaginormous Challenge.
Roald Dahl’s Imaginormous Challenge launched in 2017 across America.
Before that, the Roald Dahl Story Company sponsored an annual literature prize. It was respected within the industry, which was lovely. Unfortunately, almost nobody outside the industry had heard of it.
So we decided to rethink the whole thing.
Instead of creating another prize for grown-ups who already liked literature prizes, we turned our attention to the real heroes of Roald Dahl’s stories. Kids.
At the time, people like Sir Ken Robinson had been warning about a growing creativity crisis in education. Children were being taught to get things right, rather than encouraged to imagine something new.
The Imaginormous Challenge was our small attempt to push back.
“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”
The idea was to help children unlock their creativity, inspired by one of the most famous imaginations in the world.
But we did not want another traditional story-writing competition. The point wasn’t to reward the best spelling, neatest handwriting or most technically accomplished mini-novelist.
We wanted as many children as possible to have a go.
So we made entering dead simple. Inspired by Roald Dahl’s own creative process, children only had to submit an idea for a story. Not the whole thing. Just the bones of a thought, enough to get the whole process rolling.
Working with Penguin and Scholastic, we distributed 250,000 idea packs to classrooms across America.
Each one was packed with strange little exercises and wonky warm-ups, like asking children to invent a new ice-cream flavour for animals.
Mine was Fishtachio. For seals, obviously.
The aim was not to tell children what kind of ideas to have. It was simply to get young minds whirring. Just enough of a nudge to send their imaginations off somewhere unpredictable.
Every child came away with an idea of their very own to treasure.
But we also wanted to show them just how far those ideas could go.
So each year, we picked a handful and turned them into something gloriously unexpected.
A theatrical performance by the cast of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A custom toy created by Warner Bros designers. A movie scene filmed at Warner Bros Studios. A Minecraft world built by the game’s lead designers. An original sweet created by Dylan’s Candy Bar.
Not bad for something that began life as a small, weird thought on an exercise sheet.
In its first year, the challenge hit its target of sending 100,000 new story ideas out into the world. Over the next few years, it expanded to South Africa, France, India and Australia, helping us work towards an even more ambitious goal of generating one million new ideas worldwide.
And with that, I will leave the final word to Brian from Austin, whose brilliantly bizarre idea might never have existed without this challenge. And personally, I think the world is a slightly better place for it.
“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!”
