About the franchise
Engineering is the superpower
BEAR Facts of Engineering is a story-first STEM adventure series for readers aged 8 to 12, and the beginning of something considerably larger. This page explains what we are building, and why we think it matters now.
What BFOE is
BFOE is a cast of bear engineers, each matched to a real engineering discipline, who solve adventures where the engineering is the tool that saves the day and never the lecture. A volcano wakes. A satellite whispers on a channel nobody monitors. The ground under the sea gets ready to move.
The order of priorities is fixed and we do not bend it. Adventure first. Engineering second. Educational value third. If a choice would make a book more educational at the cost of making it a worse story, the story wins. Children can tell when they are being taught at, and they close the book. The educational value is real, deliberate and considerable, but it arrives as a consequence of a good adventure, not as a reason for one.
Why now
Children starting primary school today will finish their education into a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence and, close behind it, quantum science. Both are disruptive to the fabric of ordinary life: to work, to truth, to what a human being is for. Nobody can tell an eight year old exactly what the next fifty years hold, and anybody who claims otherwise is guessing.
What we can do is prepare them differently. Not with a list of careers that may not exist, but with the disposition that survives any of it: look first, then think, then move. Understand a problem before acting on it. Work with people whose strengths are not yours. Build something rather than wait for someone else to. That disposition is what engineering teaches, and it is why we think a story about a bear reading a mountain is worth more than another worksheet.
This is a hopeful project. The uncertainty is real, and so is the case for optimism, and children deserve to be handed the second along with the first.
The library
Book One, The Burning Mountain, is published. Book Two, The Satellite Whispers, is finished in manuscript. Book Three is in development. Behind them sits a story pipeline built to keep producing, across two tracks, one grounded on Earth and one in near orbit.
The plan is a hundred books. That will take years, and we know it. What will not move is the standard: every one of them has to be an adventure worth reading before it is anything else.
Beyond the page
The books are the spine. These grow from it.
Screen
Two YouTube channels, @BFOEStories for young readers and @BFOEWorkshop for the grown-ups who make things, with animation in development.
Audio
Audiobooks and original music, so a story can travel in a car, at bedtime, or in a classroom without a single page being turned.
Things to hold
Figurines, card games, and personalised cards and keepsakes are in development. A character a child can hold is a character a child keeps.
In the classroom
Lesson packs aligned to seven national curricula, the TEDDIES framework, and author visits to schools.
Across borders
BFOE is written in Mauritius by a producer who lives there, with a co-author in Glasgow, about a team of bears who could be working anywhere. That is not an accident. We publish in UK and US English already, translation into other languages is planned, and our classroom materials are built to align with regional curricula rather than assuming that one country's syllabus is the default.
A standing rule governs all of it: we name real places and we invent every institution. No nation is ever the villain in a BFOE story. A child in any country should be able to read these books and find nobody to be ashamed of.
The bigger goal
Here is the ambitious part, stated plainly rather than dressed up.
BFOE will be a good teacher and a good companion to the curriculum. We want it to be more than that. We intend to earn a seat at the tables where the future of school-age education is discussed internationally: to bring what we learn from children, parents and teachers into those rooms, to carry back what is coming, and to help young people adapt to it through the ways we tell stories and build resources.
That is a bold thing to write down. It will take years and a great deal of work, and there will be plenty of closed doors. We are writing it down anyway. A target no one can see is a target nobody can aim for.
How we work
Three commitments, because they explain most of our decisions.
Children are not the customer, and they are the point. Parents, teachers and gift-buyers pay for the books. Children decide whether they are any good. We build for both, and when the two disagree, the child's experience of the story decides.
We do not overstate. If something is in development, we say so. If it does not exist, it does not appear on this site. The engineering in the stories is checked, and where we simplify we say that too.
We are built with our readers. Some of what is in these books started as a question from a child or a note from a teacher. The Workshop Programme exists so that stays true as we grow.
The people
Jimmy Johnston MBE
Co-author and creative originator
Thirty years teaching technology in Glasgow classrooms, an MBE for services to education and young engineers, and the TEDDIES framework that BFOE grew from.
Read Jimmy's story
Martin Sansone
Co-creator and producer
Writes and produces the series from Mauritius, and builds everything around the books.
Read Martin's story
Come and build it with us
Follow the series free, step inside The BFOE Den, or apply to help steer what we make next.
Engineering is the superpower.