Former lawyer Sophie Deen is the founder of kids’ media company Bright Little Labs, which makes cartoons, books, games and interactive experiences for kids 3+. Their mission? To prepare kids for the future. Their original content teaches kids 21st century skills like computer science, spotting fake news—and the power of a good emoji. “It’s about giving kids 21st century skills and showing them inspiring role models,” says Sophie. Her best-known creation is Agent Asha, an 11-year-old English girl of Indian heritage, who is a talented spy expert in coding and STEM (science, technology, engineering maths) skills. In Perspectives podcast ‘Agent of change’, Sophie and Sharon Pearson talks female protagonists, storytelling as an agent of global change and how and why to get kids of both sexes involved in STEM subjects: “It’s such a big part of our society. It's our medicine, it's technology, it's engineering. It's the world that we live in.”
Zero: BRIGHT LITTLE LABS
—Sharon and Sophie met through a mutual friend in Melbourne. Sophie lives in the UK and is speaking from Portugal’s Lisbon where she is writing the next book in her Agent Asha children’s book series.
—Sophie explains she is the founder of kids’ media startup Bright Little Labs that makes cartoons, books, apps, games and interactive experiences: “It's sort of about giving kids 21st century skills and showing them inspiring role models.” She runs the company, creatively develops the ideas and writes the stories.
—Sharon says Sophie is underselling herself: “This extraordinary woman has done some study and has realized the under-representation of female protagonists and anybody of any diverse characteristics as protagonists in children's books.” Asks if it’s too simplistic to expect that if “we're exposed to certain gender stereotypes as kids, surely that must impact how we expect the world to be when we get older?”
—Sophie “wholeheartedly” believes that’s what it is. “And actually storytelling is meant for that. It's meant for humans to be able to spread a message far and wide, it's easier than telling people facts. So you use stories to disseminate your values or your cultures, or to inspire people to do something. And if we're always saying … if you're white, you're more visible, if you're male, then you are more powerful. Your voice is more important. You know, we all internalize those stories and it shapes what we think we can become and what we think other people are going to become.”
_Says we stereotype boys “massively” in stories, tell them that “to be strong, you can't have emotions, you can't show emotions, and that's just as damaging. I personally don't think it's simplistic to think that those stories are blueprints for how we see the world when we grow up.”
—Sharon has “always thought the storytelling was the most powerful and profound way to go into the unconscious mind. And so we can't really underestimate the power of storytelling to children.” Talks about a group of children aged five to seven who were asked to draw a pilot, a surgeon, and a firefighter. Of all the drawings only five were female (all drawn by girls.) Then “the door opened and they were all in full uniform and they’re all female. And the whole room you could have heard a pin drop as all these little kids assimilated what they weren't expecting would walk through that door.”
—Sophie asks if we take a snapshot of the media we consume, what it says about what we really think. Says in stories girls “are more likely to have magic or sort of princess powers to get them out of a tricky situation. Whereas boys will be shown to be using their problem solving skills.”
—Sharon: “I find that absolutely fascinating. Girls are raised where the majority of the story, the problems they've solved, are done by magic, magical thinking, or being rescued by boys.” Women fill only one third of STEM industry jobs.
—Sophie says in England less than a third of STEM roles are taken by women and that has flatlined. “I look at the sort of initiatives that we’re taking, I see a fundamental shift in media and the stories that we tell our kids, they're still, it's still not sort of being absorbed.”
9.14: GETTING MESSY
—Sharon says growing up gender neutral clothing and games in stores wouldn’t have worked for her growing up: “I wanted the Barbie so hard. All my friends had the Barbie. There was a Tonka bulldozer and a truck that you could dump everything into. And I thought that was cool. But what if I get messy?”
—Sophie says “everybody is different” but “being messy and not being messy is a stereotype that's put onto kids when they're young, you know, like it's okay for a boy to be messy. It's a sign of your masculinity. I think it would be so interesting because the gendered element of clothing and toys and everything when we're young is so prolific that I think it's very hard to know if there are natural tendencies towards one kind of way No one comes out the womb and they're like, Oh, intrinsically I felt pink as a feminine color. It just isn't true.”
—Sharon outlines the Big Five psychological assessment to Sophie. “Girls are generally across all population types, come out as more agreeable, which means they're more likely to be caring, more likely to be nurturing.”
—Sophie thinks men are taught to be less like that. “I think, are there any actual differences between the genders? I probably think you could condition the whole world to flip that and that, um, you know, give us 300 years of this or more, and you could come out the other side, but that's just my opinion.”
—Sharon loves Agent Asha for her skill with coding and passion for adventure at age 11.
—Sophie describes Agent Asha: she lives in Wembley, “she's sort of an average kid” with a sister and parents. “The thing that's really interesting about her is that she is part of a global organization called the Children's Spy Agency and she spends all of her spare time investigating the truth and solving missions. It's a secret organization. They have their bases underneath libraries all over the world. Asher’s really good at coding but the thing that’s really defining about her is sort of her relentless search for the truth. She wants to get to the bottom of everything. Um, and so she uses those and it's not just coding. She uses sort of, um, her digital skills, uh, to help her get out of problems.”
—She has British Indian heritage. Studies show less than four per cent of protagonists in any children’s stories have any colour.
—When Sharon says she wanted to be a princess growing up, Sophie says there’s “nothing wrong” with that “completely relatable fantasy. I think it's important that young girls and young boys can imagine themselves in those fantasy worlds.”
—Sharon was raised on books where the girls and boys in the group were equal until “the girls had to make the dinner.”
—Sophie says kids take Asha very seriously, and “write in with a gadget design or with some intelligence that they want us to know about and codes that they're breaking or making. We get this buy in and massive engagement that, you know, I I'm powerful too. I could discover the truth too. And I want to be part of that.” Says they make boys feel included too, with the front cover image being a girl.
—Sharon asks Sophie her thoughts on studies showing little boys generally would prefer to have little boy heroes.
—Sophie: “One of the most frustrating things that happened on my journey so far.” When she came up with Agent Asha and started speaking to publishers, “everyone was like, ‘Oh, so it's a bit for girls.’ Explain to me what you've just said, that if it has a girl on the front cover, it's a bit for girls. Whereas if it's a boy, it's a book for everybody and it just seems so. It seems genuinely stupid to me that like, of course that's happening, If you keep telling people that that's the case and you'll just keep, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
—Sharon: “It's just like going into the boys club of STEM. You go into the tech industry, the stories about Silicon Valley about how it's a giant boys club.” Asks how those perspectives started.
00:22:16] GIANT BOYS’ CLUB
—Sophie agrees. “And that's why I also think it's as important that young boys read our stories. I think it's completely normal to have a female heroine and a dove. Says having a female protagonist “you want to go on those adventures with” who instils respect for girls and women. “It's super tough in these industries to break through when you're excluded. And I think you're right, that it starts really early on.”
—Sharon: “The moment you're in the category of exception, there's a presupposition there. You've got to somehow prove you can fit in with the norm instead of expanding what norm should be. That's how I interpret what I'm seeing here with the work you're doing. Asher’s a great protagonist and nothing else needs to be said”.
—Sophie agrees: “it's really important that the story is really engaging. And that is why we want kids to go for it for no other reason than it sounds like a really cool spy agency and they want to be part of it.”
24:46 NOT PLAYING IT SAFE
—Asked what it’s been like to create Asha, Sophie says her background isn’t in the creative industry so “the learning curve is constantly steep. But the wonderful things has been working with a community of people who want to create, working with people with lived experience of her character and the kids and the grandparents.” Has had “the most amazing experience” creating her with input from “really cool technical people, people who are really interested in artificial intelligence,” Says it has been tough to crack media. “People always want to play it safe, you know, like make it a bit safer. Just give her a younger brother that would be safer. Then we'll definitely be appealing to boys and girls. And like those sorts of, um, quite strong suggestions that have come up along the way. They've been quite hard for me as a tiny company.”
—Has had definite mixed feeling ranging from being resolute to regretful about her stance: “You know, I've got such a big opportunity and I want to just change things a little bit in the mainstream. I don't want to have something so radical that it becomes so niche that only a few people see it. And so I'm really conscious to keep it mainstream.’
—Sesame Street was a “huge inspiration” because of its mission to make education accessible. “For $5 a head, it got kids to the same level of numeracy and literacy as $7,000, a head preschool education. “And they were amazing. They showed people living in tenement blocks, they showed poor people. They showed people of different ethnicities.” It made her wonder how to get to TV and she wrote a book first that started winning awards including the best coding book. “And then we signed a deal with a publisher, and then we got investment. We started to speaking to the big media companies about investing in our company and ultimately took an investment from Warner.”
32:19: Sophie discusses contract negotiations and how her company has a “direct relationship” with the kids who write to Bright Little Labs and play on the website. “We get to learn about them directly. Whereas in traditional media companies, when you've got a television, it's a much more of a passive relationship. You don't really know your kids.” She has the data and insights to “inform our content that we can make better content for kids. And so the investment was around the sort of the strengths of the IP and the stories, but it was also about the sort of trying to innovate the approach in kids’ media and, um, create games and interactive experiences”
—33.34: Asha’s adventures are already a game. Sophie says there are Easter eggs hidden, and kids are basically guided to sign up and download the free app. In the UK kids can also get a subscription pack and are sent monthly missions and training. Working with Warner to turn it into a major cartoon.
35:08 REWINDING THE VIDEOTAPE
—Sharon asks Sophie to talk about her “pretty amazing” career before Bright Little Labs.
—Sophie was “very briefly a lawyer” because her family wanted her to have a professional career, “but it wasn’t for me.” She had a career in tech then in the UK in 2014 computing was introduced into the primary school curriculum and she partnered Google and the Department for Education to teach teachers about that curriculum. Says computer science is “sort of like logic and instruction, giving and sequencing and problem solving.” After she helped introduce computer science into schools noticed a social and digital divide: kids would learn at school but at home “parents felt completely alienated. Like, I can't even, like, I hate my printer. That was exacerbating, um, a divided social divide and a digital divide. And that it would be great if we could tackle that with something mainstream and inclusive, like a story or a cartoon.”
—Sharon says what Sophie is doing fits into a bigger narrative, that adults feel it’s “too late” to train in STEM: “What is it we need to be thinking about before we get to university before we realize we haven't gone to Silicon Valley because we're female or whatever else is this, what else is it?”
—Sophie: “Such an interesting question, because actually, like it's not particularly a passion for technology. I think everybody should feel empowered to have a say in the world that we live in and we need everybody to create that world. We, we need everybody to do that. And so for me, the genesis is two-fold: one, question the system. Do we like the systems that we're living in and as a kid, if you're thinking about the future, creating comes out of being able to sort of, um, look around you and think, do you, do you like it? Do you want to create more of this? And then feeling empowered, like that's your place and you're able to, you have the skills to and the ability to think for yourself. To know that you can create and to think about what you want it to create. And then once you get there, technology is a tool that's going to help you create things and help open up doors for you. It's going to open up career opportunities across all industries. You don't need to be a coder. You can work in anything that you're passionate about and digital skills will help you just like literacy helps you.”
—Feels that in the next five to ten years it will become a basic literacy skill like reading and writing.
—Thinking genesis, Sharon says as a kid she lived on a farm and “the only way I rolled was just messy. I think there's research showing … girls are encouraged by parents to look pretty and neat and boys are encouraged to be robust and go out and play that right there to me as a genesis moment. To think about what are we imposing upon the child now, maybe they want to stay pretty.” Says girls are asked what have you done to your dress and we laugh at the boy covered in mud. “Isn't that a genesis moment right there where we've had a predictable response that is determining their next decision?”
—Sophie: “Again, I'm being really general, but even that small thing of being told that it's unfeminine to be messy or dirty, and being told that masculine to be messy and dirty, I think it genuinely has implications.
—Sharon cites a study showing women also do more housework (in Australia, five hours more a week than men.) “And I keep coming back to when we younger, what we see our parents do. So a lot of the stories show, if you see a mother she's calling you in for dinner and telling you it's time to eat, which means she's been in the kitchen. If the man's there, who's there as a pal, he's there supportive, he's going to help me with the problem. That's determining. I'm not that naive and I'm not oversimplifying it, but it has to be, even if it's 2 per cent of factors contributing to me not going into STEM.
44.06: RESILIENCE
—Sophie used to do this when giving talks or presentations: spent five minutes on Google and type in cartoon with any industry: chef, business person, secretary, doctor, nurse: “The internet will show you what gender it thinks those roles are.”
—Sharon cites research showing teachers have biases around what the girls will do and what the boys will do, “and there's these expectations built into it. And as much as we try and overcome these unconscious biases, it's almost self-fulfilling. By the time we're in adulthood, we're kind of locked and loaded. What can we do from an educational perspective? So the big people can think about it differently.”
—Adds that she “loves” teachers and that some subjects probably “don’t serve the future. We're about to go into and probably have quite radical views on education. I think we really need to be teaching kids collaboration, communication, creativity, emotional resilience, survival skills.”
—Sharon asks Sophie’s views on teaching emotional resiliency.
—Sophie says it’s hard. “Again, I think stories of emotional resiliency, both fictional and non-fictional stories looking at inspiring characters. And their real journey. (Cites Abraham Lincoln.) “So yeah, I'm showing kids, the more naked truth. What is the difference between success and failure? It's just a series of failures, you know, like, but you just keep going.”
—Sharon says emotional resilience is not something you can tell a child, it’s about experiences.
—Sophie has a teacher friend with kids with lower emotional resilience: she uses a box filled with tactile objects and encourages them to practice “deep breathing, affirmations, meditation. Then over time you learn.” Says you can provide opportunities to discover it in a learning environment.
—Sharon loves that, “combined with the storytelling zero to hero stories. With expected, twists and turns. I'd love that then with teaching emotional regulation, Florida university in 2011, I'm just going to read from here. They studied 6000 picture books published between 1900 and 2000 and only 7.5 per cent of them pick female animal protagonists.”
—Sophie: “I think that that's just a subliminal whisper in our ear saying, um, men's voices should be listened to more. And it's those sorts of nuanced values that are contained in our stories I think we really need to watch out for, and really need to offer something a bit different, which is what I'm trying. I'm not trying to say everything's awful because it's a bit too simplistic to do that too. There's lots of reasons why things are the way that they are. And it's more like, what do we want now and how can we work to offer them so that there is an alternative.”
51.12 STEM
—Sophie reiterates that STEM is “such a big part of our society. It's like our medicine, it's technology, it's engineering. It's the world that we live in. And at the same, when I look at it again, who runs big businesses. Predominantly men. And so just, yeah, I think we need to change it. And for me, a good place to start is changing the values and the stories early on so that kids can see that it could be different.
—Sharon asks Sophie if she’s enjoying her work. She is, “especially now my mind is fully in the next book and the next book is all about misinformation. Um, and uh, sort of a globe there's a global vote and no one knows what the truth is. Everyone's being swamped with fake news.”
—Sharon: “You're making such a difference to impact kids all around the world.”
RESOURCES:
Sophie Deen is the founder and CEO of kids’ media company, Bright Little Labs. They make cartoons, games and toys to promote STEM, 21st century skills, critical thinking + equality for all kids aged 3+. The company has users in 100+ countries and raised Series A investment with WarnerMedia in 2018.
Before starting Bright Little Labs Sophie worked alongside Code Club, Google and the Department for Education to introduce the computing curriculum into primary schools in England. As a former lawyer, techie and children’s play therapist, she is passionate about creative education and positive role models for kids.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/sophie_deen?lang=en
Bright Little Labs:
Bright Little Labs is a kids media startup on a mission to prepare all kids for the future. Their original content teaches kids 21st century skills like computer science, spotting fake news, and the power of a good emoji. Founded by Sophie Deen in 2016 on the back of a successful Kickstarter, Bright Little Labs has won multiple awards and has users in over 100 countries on their digital platform. WarnerMedia is their strategic investor, plus they have a three-book deal with Walker books and a team of techies who love making games.
Agent Asha for ages 6+:
Asha Joshi has just been recruited by the top-secret Children’s Spy Agency. Her first mission is to investigate who—or what—is bringing down the Internet. Asha is fearless and can code with her eyes closed, but this mission is dangerous. She’ll have to hack into the world’s biggest tech company, battle deadly sharks and avoid setting off her farting selfie stick. Can she save the day before the whole world loses its mind … and its Wi-Fi connection?