“The secret” is a story of a young girl from North Africa, who arrives to Europe to discover a family secret. She doesn’t know what it is exactly, but she heard some rumors… Is it a treasure? To achieve her goal, she has to face a lot of difficulties as a lonely person in a new environment. She meets new people, she explores the city and learns how to get around. Basically, she does all these things, which all immigrants and refugees always have to do in the “new beginning”. Not all situations are easy to handle, but she knows, she can’t give up.

This simple story is a treasure hunt with a twist of adventure in it, action and humour. It has been created for my client, who is working on an online language platform in cooperation with UNICEF. The main goal is to help refugees to settle down in a new country by learning a language. 

Language project provides typical teaching methods as lessons in the form of interactive slides, but also trying to take children’s attention with games and songs to teach them in a nice and friendly way. “The secret” is playing a leading role for the rest of the content by being a story, which users can identify with.

It comes in two different versions. One of them is a short video, which I would describe as something between graphic novel and an animation, where the story is a full live medium with cartoon illustrations, dialogues, motions and sound. You can think, we now live in XXI century, but still there are places in the world, where internet access is something exclusive. For those I have prepared “offline” version of “The secret” and it’s a form of… comic. By reading it and looking at the illustrations students can learn from the context. They should be able to recognise similar situations in their lives and learn the most useful words and expressions. The cartoonish form makes it more attractive and the story is mysterious and funny itself, which should be inviting and make our students to maintain interest and have fun.

We know how hard immigrant’s life can be sometimes. Let’s try to understand refugees as well!

Thank you! :)