Competition Research

Usborne has been around since 1973 and specialise in children's books. One of their most successful series was the Puzzle Adventures. These books contained bright images and challenging puzzles for children to do. The books stories always seem to follow very interesting adventures, specifically adventures that children would enjoy such as outer space, pirates or western.
Each of the puzzles seem to contain lots of different object along with a story line. Example puzzles are things like matching objects to owners, finding objects or mazes. Each of these are good examples of puzzles that are interesting to children as well as being simple enough for them to be able to solve.

There are a lot of "typical" puzzle books out there that usually involve large colourful letters in order to grab the attention of children in stores etc. There is a minimal amount of white space and there are no dull or dark colours used. The puzzles inside also seem to revolve around finding things and matching objects but can contain a vast amount of different puzzles such as spot the difference or simple number puzzles.



On the right is a simple puzzle that has been devised for use in a puzzle book. It may be in black and white but that makes it no less interesting. There is plenty of illustration going on in order to keep children entertained. The puzzle in this example is to get the pirate to the treasure but he is only able to touch the squares with even numbers on them. This is a good example of how a simple puzzle can be made into something educational.