(Beijing) "What should we do when the traffic light turns red?" "Should children sit in the front or the back seat inside the vehicle?" These seemingly easy questions are closely connected to the daily traffic safety and healthy growth of children at the age ranging from 4 to 6. On Monday, BMW launched its virtual "Children's Traffic Safety Game Park", in which children and parents can grasp quickly necessary traffic safety knowledge while enhancing awareness of self-protection by easy clicking. Through this network platform, BMW plans to recruit members to the real off-line event, the 2008 BMW Children's Traffic Safety Education Program, currently touring in ten big cities across China.
BMW has designed the themed game "Hide and Seek: Traffic Safety Hot-Spot" in the virtual park based on children's adaptive learning ability and their active nature. Various traffic "Hot-Spots", namely traffic situations, characters or elements, are integrated into the cartoon "game carpet". Children and Parents must look together for every clickable "Hot-Spot", and be ready for questions in multiple choice styles from "traffic angle". Even if the answer is not right, "traffic angle" will kindly encourage the participants and provide relevant traffic safety tips. All participants can also register to a lucky draw to win an invitation for a real Children's Traffic Safety Program activity and other fun prizes upon successful completion of the game. BMW invites children and parents from across the country to log on to http://www.bmw.com.cn to start fun interactive learning.
In cooperation with China Children's Center, BMW will set up Traffic Theme Parks at local Children's Palaces throughout 2008 and give 3200 Chinese children from over 100 kindergartens an enjoyable and interesting traffic education training session. So far the program has successfully concluded its activities in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Wenzhou. After the summer vacation, the program will resume to Shenyang, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Chengdu, Wuhan and Beijing. Each stop will select 5 online registered children by lucky draw to participate in the activities to be held in the city. In addition, another 20 children from each city will be awarded children's traffic safety book "Anna, Paul and Peipei" prepared by BMW. The final winners' list will be announced on Sept. 9th.
Mr. Alfred Rupp, President and CEO of BMW Brilliance Automotive said, "It is the fourth successive year that BMW has held the children's traffic safety themed program since 2005. More and more parents and children are expressing their willingness to be involved into this fun and informative program. Therefore the virtual children's traffic safety park has become the highlight of this year's program, which we believe will greatly promote BMW Children's Safety Education to benefit more children and parents."
As its long-term commitment to China, BMW has been devoting continuous effort to popularize children's traffic safety education. After initiating its first Children's Traffic Safety Education Program in 2005, BMW has been vigorously expanding the program and received strong support and good comments from the government and people from all walks of life. Apart from launching the program across 10 big cities in China this year, BMW has also worked with China's renowned kindergarten experts to prepare a "Traffic Safety Package" for children from 500 kindergartens, who may have no chance to directly participate in the activities, increasing the overall number of benefiting children to over 100,000.
