The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,47

one by one. She showed them a picture of an anteater.

“What does an anteater eat?” she asked.

Walker said, “Ants.”

Sherman turned the page to a picture of an elephant. She pointed at its trunk.

“What’s that?”

Walker peered in. “A trunk.”

She pointed at the tusks. “Do you know what the white things are?”

Walker looked again. “Nostrils.”

She showed them a picture of a bear, then came the first Blue’s clue, a little splotch of white and black tattooed with one of Blue’s paw prints.

“That’s black and white,” Anna said.

Sherman looked at the two of them. “What animal could Blue want to learn about?” She paused. Anna and Walker looked puzzled. Finally Walker broke the silence:

“We had better go to the next clue.”

The second round of puzzles was a little harder. There was a picture of a bird. The kids were asked what the bird was doing—the answer was singing—and then why it was doing that. They talked about beavers and worms and then came to the second Blue’s clue—an iceberg. Anna and Walker were still stumped. On they went to the third round, a long discussion of fish. Sherman showed them a picture of a little fish lying camouflaged at the bottom of the sea, eying a big fish.

“Why is the fish hiding?” Sherman asked.

WALKER: “Because of the giant fish.”

ANNA: “Because he will eat him.”

They came to the third Blue’s clue. It was a cardboard cutout of one of Blue’s paw prints. Sherman took the paw print and moved it toward Walker and Anna, wiggling it as she did.

“What’s this doing?” she asked.

Walker screwed up his face in concentration. “It’s walking like a human,” he said.

“Is it wriggling like a human?” Sherman asked.

“It’s waddling,” Anna said.

Sherman went over the clues in order: black and white, ice, waddling.

There was a pause. Suddenly Walker’s face lit up. “It’s a penguin!” He was shouting with the joy of discovery. “A penguin’s black and white. It lives on the ice and it waddles!”

Blue’s Clues succeeds as a story of discovery only if the clues are in proper order. The show has to start out easy—to give the viewers confidence—and then get progressively harder and harder, challenging the preschoolers more and more, drawing them into the narrative. The first set of puzzles about anteaters and elephants had to be easier than the set of puzzles about beavers and worms, which in turn had to be easier than the final set about fish. The layering of the show is what makes it possible for a child to watch the show four and five times: on each successive watching they master more and more, guessing correctly deeper into the program, until, by the end, they can anticipate every answer.

After the morning of testing, the Blue’s Clues team sat down and went through the results of the puzzles, one by one. Thirteen out of the 26 children guessed correctly that anteaters ate ants, which wasn’t a good response rate for the first clue. “We like to open strong,” Wilder said. They continued on, rustling through their papers. The results of a puzzle about beavers drew a frown from Wilder. When shown a picture of a beaver dam, the kids did badly on answering the first question—what is the beaver doing?—but very well (19 out of 26) on the second question, why is he doing it? “The layers are switched,” Wilder said. She wanted the easier question first. On to the fish questions: Why was the little fish hiding from the big fish? Sherman looked up from her notes. “I had a great answer. ‘The little fish didn’t want to scare the big fish.’ That’s why he was hiding.” They all laughed.

Finally, came the most important question. Was the order of Blue’s clues correct? Wilder and Gilman had presented the clues in the order that the script had stipulated: ice, waddle, then black and white. Four of the 17 kids they talked to guessed penguin after the first clue, six more guessed it after the second clue and four after all three clues. Wilder then turned to Sherman, who had given her clues in a different order: black and white, ice, waddle.

“I had no correct answers out of nine kids after one clue,” she reported. “After ice, I was one of nine, and after waddle I was six of nine.”

“Your clincher clue was waddle? That seems to work,” Wilder responded. “But along the way were they guessing lots of different things?”

“Oh yes,” Sherman said. “After one clue, I had guesses of dogs, cows,