The Rez - A Podcast to Save the Future.

[millipedia]

I've been itching to show this one off for ages....

JoinTheRez.com is the companion website to a science fiction podcast and comic which aims to help pre-teens build emotional resilence and mental well being.

The story includes supportive themes and messages based on research by the University of Sussex CRESS Lab led by Professor Robin Banerjee, Professor of Kindness at the University of Sussex (no really).

In the comic, which is set in the future, our heroes are able to contact young people in the current day using a mobile phone. We ran with this idea to create a phone interface for the site which enables users to undertake lots of different activities including games (Fart Cow Frisbee!) , puzzles, a podcast player, and even recording audio messages to send to the characters.

There's a section for adults which includes lesson plans and teaching resources.

We used PW to allow the client to manage various bits of content including messages, a news feed and the podcasts themselves.

We created a bespoke module for an online Survey for the site as well building the code to handle distribution of the podcasts including the RSS feed and scheduled release of episodes - although in the end the podcast was picked up by GenZ / PRX in the states so they are handling the audio feed now.

Notable modules we used were:

ProCache (first time we've used it - works well)
ProForms (for a contact form, we ended up building our own module for a more complex survey)
Tracey Debugger (of course).

It was a lot of work - I did have to spend much too long chosing the best fart noises for some of the games - but it was a lot of fun.