Martin Sansone

Martin Sansone has spent most of his life being curious about how things work, how people solve problems, and what happens when somebody decides there must be a better way.

His working life has taken a rather unusual route. He began his career as an accountant with an energy company in England, but quickly realised that spending the rest of his life in accounting probably wasn't going to keep him interested. When an opportunity to move into another part of the company was blocked, Martin resigned, mortgaged his house and went into business for himself.

That decision set a pattern.

He moved through entrepreneurship, advertising and marketing just as the digital world was beginning to emerge. Realising that the internet was going to transform the industry he worked in, he taught himself software development, web technologies and digital production, built his own new-media and advertising business, and later qualified to teach and spent two years as a part-time college lecturer in new media design.

Over the years that followed, Martin became a software developer, CTO and technology architect, working on complex systems for companies and government while continuing to build businesses of his own. His work has ranged from websites and animation to digital identity, financial technology and large-scale payment systems.

But work is only part of the story.

Martin has always been drawn to unfamiliar places, new cultures and experiences that make the world feel bigger. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Britain and the United States, spent time working remotely from Belize long before "digital nomad" became a familiar phrase, sailed with a friend's charter-catamaran business, travelled widely through Asia and Australia, and has so far visited roughly a third of the world.

One adventure nearly cost him rather more than he planned. Martin spent a season volunteering with the Turtle Foundation on Boa Vista in Cape Verde, helping protect nesting loggerhead turtles from poachers alongside an international conservation team and local authorities. By day he helped educate visitors and schoolchildren. By night he patrolled remote beaches. A serious injury during one of those patrols eventually resulted in an emergency evacuation to Germany for surgery.

Through much of this rather unpredictable journey, one of Martin's closest friends was a Glasgow technology teacher called Jimmy Johnston.

They had met around twenty years earlier through a television-production venture and discovered that they could spend very long evenings discussing ideas. Their friendship survived different countries, different careers, successes, setbacks and some of the hardest periods of their lives.

Jimmy had spent years talking about an educational idea called TEDDIES and, later, a phrase he had coined: BEAR Facts of Engineering. Behind it was a dream of creating stories in which children could discover engineering through characters and adventure rather than lessons.

For years, the ambition was bigger than the practical means of producing it.

Then technology caught up.

When high-quality animation and digital creative tools became accessible enough for a small independent team to use, Martin told Jimmy that the time had finally arrived to stop talking about the dream and start building it.

What began as an idea for animated adventures grew into BEAR Facts of Engineering, or BFOE, with Jimmy as its creative originator and co-author and Martin as co-creator, producer and one of the architects of the expanding story world.

Martin brings to BFOE a lifetime spent crossing boundaries between technology, business, creativity, teaching and adventure. He is particularly interested in stories where complicated ideas become understandable because somebody actually has to use them to solve a problem.

That has become one of the rules behind BFOE: the adventure comes first. Engineering is not there to interrupt the story. It is what gives the characters the ability to change its outcome.

Martin now works from Mauritius developing BFOE books, illustrations, animation, educational projects and the systems that hold the growing franchise together. Some of his toughest critics are two young learners in his own family, who have been testing his educational ideas since they were small and remain remarkably effective at identifying anything adults think is clever but children simply find boring.

His belief is straightforward:

Challenges will come in life. What matters is how we understand them, how we respond to them, and who we choose to face them with.

That is also why, in the world of BFOE, engineering is the superpower.