Blue's Clues - Educational Goals

Educational Goals

The creators' and producers' goals were to "empower, challenge, and build the self-esteem of preschoolers" while entertaining them. Kessler, Santomero and Johnson were influenced by the first children's television program to utilize a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum developed from research, Sesame Street. "We wanted to learn from Sesame Street and take it one step further," Santomero said. In addition to a curriculum that emphasized reasoning skills relevant to preschoolers' everyday lives, the producers wanted to include audience participation, called by Variety its "call and response style", that encouraged mastery of the information presented, positive reinforcement, and prosocial messages. In their first brainstorming sessions in 1994, Santomero, Kessler, and Johnson decided to promote mastery rather than rote learning or memorizing, make sure that their viewers knew the answers to the puzzles with which they were presented, and include elements of surprise and play.

When I believed we had the best show on television that could educate preschoolers and positively impact their lives, I was relentless. I wanted so much to give kids a television show that celebrates how smart they are, because I truly believe they are brilliant. I also wanted to create a show that would help pre-schoolers feel good about themselves".

The production of Blue's Clues was based on research that showed that television, a "cultural artifact" and accessible for most American children, could be a "powerful educational agent". Television was a potentially effective method of scientific education for young children because it told stories through pictures and because it modeled behavior and learning. The creators and producers used film techniques to present information from multiple perspectives in many "real world" contexts, or situations within the daily experiences of young children. They wanted to provide their viewers with more "authentic learning opportunities" by placing problem-solving tasks within the stories they told, by slowly increasing the difficulty of these tasks, and by inviting their involvement. These learning opportunities included the use of mnemonics in the form of mantras and songs, and what Tracy called "metacognitive wrap-up" at the end of each episode, in which the lessons were summarized and rehearsed. The producers wanted to foster their audience's sense of empowerment by eliciting their assistance for the show's host and by encouraging their identification with the character Blue, who served as a stand-in for the typical preschooler.

Sesame Street was designed around the prevailing view that preschoolers had short attention spans, so its curriculum was a magazine-like format in which each episode was made up of a variety of segments. Based on research conducted over the 30 years since the launch of Sesame Street by theorists such as Daniel Anderson of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who served as a consultant for Blue's Clues, the producers wanted to develop a show that took advantage of children's intellectual and behavioral activity when watching television. Previous children's television programs presented their content with little input from their viewers, but Blue's Clues revolutionized the genre by inviting its viewers' involvement. Its creators believed that if children were more involved in what they were viewing, they would attend to its content longer than previously expected — for up to a half hour — and learn more. They also dropped the magazine format for a more traditional narrative format. As Variety Magazine stated, "... 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. Like what had already been done in Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, which also inspired the producers, one way this was done was in the use of pauses that were "long enough to give the youngest time to think, short enough for the oldest not to get bored." The success of Blue's Clues caused Sesame Street to change its format and add more interactive segments in 2002. Blue's Clues also differed from Sesame Street by not using cultural references or humor aimed at adults, as this could confuse preschoolers, but instead made the show literal, which the producers felt would better hold the children's attention. The structure of each episode was repetitive, designed to provide preschoolers with comfort and predictability.