Sunshine Kathy, or Elleville Elfrid (in Norwegian), is an animated series for pre-schoolers produced by Kool Produktions in Norway. The key drivers for the series are creativity and pro-social skills: 5 year old Kathy is a bundle of creative energy who loves to play and explore the world around her and when she whirls into a room, everyone can’t help but smile! In each episode she uses her boundless energy and enthusiasm for life to explore a situation and as a consequence, something usually goes wrong… “Oh what a pickle!” Kathy then uses her creativity to come up with a solution so that order can be restored. All in all, what could be a better brief for a game?

Sunshine Kathy lives in Sunshine Gardens where the newest resident is now YOU! Like Kathy you have the opportunity to explore the world in which you find yourself. And as you explore things tend to go just a little bit wrong, so you need to use creative problem-solving skills in a range of different games to put things right.

There are four different sections of the gardens to explore – and as you discover each section, something usually gets in a muddle! You meet Mrs Berg who is tending her flower bed when Kathy’s football flies into the middle of it and squashes them all. It’s your job to plant more flowers from the seed packets along the bottom of the screen, place them in the now empty flowerbed and water them to life with the watering can to get in Mrs Berg’s good books again.

When you wander over to the duck pond you accidentally scare all the ducks away, but they all fly back again and you can now make them sing in beautiful harmony… (Norwegian for “quack” anyone?). We couldn’t resist another outing for this “Ant Chorus”-style mechanic.

You can jump into a pile of leaves and make beautiful patterns as you tidy them up or you can find Mr Johansen in his shed – but be careful! You’ll have to put everything back together again if you knock his tools over… Sounds like a good opportunity to build something different… perhaps a go-kart? As you can see, the trend of destroy-then-create runs throughout the website – enabling you to share Kathy’s infectious enthusiasm wherever you go.

Sunshine Kathy is now integrated into Barne TV, part of NRK’s main children’s website (the Norwegian equivalent of CBeebies) and is available to explore and play here.