"Letters from Felix": Virtual World Tour

By Nathalie Vera, Letters from Felix

The “Letters from Felix” project at UC Santa Barbara is a virtual world tour and learning experience for children, parents and educators. The digital project was inspired by the children’s book of the same name and follows a similar concept. Felix, a stuffed rabbit, disappears in a crowded airport by accident when his owner Sophie and her family fly home from a trip. As Sophie returns home, Felix embarks on a whirlwind international tour, communicating with Sophie via five letters. The letters, tucked into envelopes attached to the book’s pages, detail the rabbit’s adventures in Paris, Cairo, Rome, Kenya, and New York City. Each letter documents his unique experience in the places visited, with artwork and pictures of Felix in each city to complement his descriptions.

The team project mimics this experience in a digitalized format and incorporates multisensory tools to enhance the virtual world tour. “Letters from Felix” becomes “Letters from Ole”, the tale about a friendly squirrel from UCSB who also gets lost in an airport and travels to different places around the world by accident as he struggles to find the right way home. Ole, in spite of being lost and confused. decides to record his experiences. The very modern and practical creature creates a website about his impromptu trip and the things he learns along the way. The website then becomes an immediate way for Ole to communicate with his worried friends at UCSB. and it is where he records all of his foreign trips in minutiae. This website begins with a world map where the six cities he visits –Lima, Dublin, Rome, Tokyo, New Delhi, London, and New York – are merely a click away. Upon clicking on a city’s geographic location on the map. users are redirected to a blog dedicated to each specific locale. The blogs vary in content and format –the same way in which postcards vary in design –but they are uniform in providing videos, audio, pictures, and links to other websites of relevance to complement the written word. Furthermore, printable passports and souvenirs from each country are available for an even more interactive experience.  

The project brings a digitally mediated performance writing, taking the concept out of the children book’s genre and transforming it into an educational session abroad, a resource for further study, a complex yet innovative learning game. Furthermore, in today’s day and age, the digitalization of children’s books promises to increase and grow in popularity given young generations’ early exposure to technology. Children exposed to technological devices at an early age appear to develop preferences towards them –iPads, cellphones and its sister gadgets debut in a kid’s life at earlier and earlier stages in recent years. Traditional children books –much like print news media. for instance – may soon gravitate towards the virtual world and become the new norm. The project therefore breaches a gap between young children and their technological tendencies, and parents and educators who must constantly endorse new teaching techniques in the classroom and at home. At the same time, the project is not intended to replace the original format of children’s books, or discourage audiences from reading them. The “Letters from Felix” project intends to supplement the print book, to incite further thought and study, to become a friendly liaison between the intricate technological world and the authentic, palpable pages of a book.      

The website provides an appropriate platform for this merging of worlds. The virtual world tour retains enough similarities to the children’s book to be considered an adaption, yet branches out into new ideas to be considered its own unique work. Regardless of whether audiences are already familiar with “Letters from Felix” or not, the trademark qualities of the children’s book genre are easy to perceive –language, tone, and visuals of the overall project are undeniably geared for kids. At the same time, the elaborate information pertaining to cultural practices, culinary choices, and touristic attractions also make it an interesting read for adults, as well as a real-life guide on what to actually expect at each locale. Each blog post can essentially act as a tour pamphlet for would-be tourists.

The project’s intentions of providing a learning experience for children are also careful in avoiding an information overload for its users.In today’s modern world, Internet users may often find themselves victims of an information overload, especially when so much of it is readily available with the simple click of the mouse. However,the nature of the website tacked this issue in dedicating separate spaces for each place, with relatively basic navigating tools to allow for rapid access to and fro pages. In this manner,the individual is better suited to properly recognize and assemble the tools given to support their learning goals. The information presented –historic, cultural, and geographic –brings children, young adults, parents, and educators an easier cognitive, learning experience.

Furthermore, this concern did not limit the team project’s creators. Team members provided external links to websites of relevance for more information or specific details on certain sections of their work. One of the most popular websites employed was the video-sharing site, YouTube. Members used YouTube videos in their blog posts to showcase a city’s cuisine, folkloric music, trademark landscapes, and more. Pictures and music were also part of this multimedia project. Essentially, as many available tools were employed in order to provide a multisensory experience, one that strives to be as realistic as possible.

While the in-person experience may be incomparable in several circumstances to any other imitation of reality, the virtual world tour seeks to imitate the experience of traveling the world and visiting the six countries selected by providing as much information about the place, and presenting it in various ways. Through drawings, pictures, video, printable souvenirs, and descriptions of the places selected, viewers are presented with distinct insights about each country. Some of these viewers may not have had the opportunity to personally visit some or any of the settings in Ole’s adventure. On the other hand, those who may have already visited some of the cities included in the map, may find that the project can compliment their experience in a similar way in which it compliments the children’s book –by exposing the place in a new perspective, by triggering meaningful memories about their visit, or by simply acting as an interactive scrapbook to look at in leisure.“Letters from Felix” seeks to transport viewers into various culturally and geographically diverse countries with the purpose of simulating a real trip to the actual place. As aforementioned, visual and audio aids depicting more about the cities selected, increase the realness of the virtual world trip, even if this realness is only accessible through a computer screen, even if the material presented is not palpable to the reader.

The web-surfing, interactive nature of the project ultimately strives to make it easier for viewers to remember aspects of the cities visited through Ole. Viewers are submerged into this alternate, virtual world, seeing and learning things they may have already seen or heard in the past, but in a distinct and unique way that is practical and innovative.

The website may also serve as a resource for parents or educators of children with learning disabilities. Those who suffer from conditions like Dysgraphia find writing very challenging –dysgraphic people have poor handwriting, problems with spelling, and difficulty in expressing their thoughts on paper. These people face difficulty in processing what they see or hear.

The website provides educational tools beneficial to a dysgraphic children’s learning experience. The trouble of organizing letters, numbers and words on a line or page is alleviated by this digital medium, as it readily presents multisensory tools that may aid their cognitive process and divert pressure and frustration from typing as all content is, as already stated, only a click away. The website’s map-like nature may also be used for older audiences, such as dysgraphic teens or adults. The website’s features may make it easier for this demographic to digest (and reproduce) information.

As discussed, the website ultimately provides a plethora of learning tools for children and their parents and educators. While it could certainly be improved –perhaps with more uniformity throughout the posts, clearer navigation instructions, or even simpler language –the concept of children’s books digitalization is one that deserves further attention and exploration. Today’s modern, technology-oriented generations will redefine the children’s book genre, as is already being done with other attractions for young kids –movies, videogames, and more. Designs and graphics in these attractions have changed in recent years, and so can children’s novels change with adaptations from print to digital media.