Happy 2014 CMA-ers! Laurie here, your intrepid guest blogger. I’m kicking off the New Year as your OFFICIAL blogger! Firstly, I hope you had a great holiday season.
Secondly, CMA had an event this past week! (I was too sick to post it then, so I’m putting it up now. Ta-da!)
Ta-da!
To kickoff our year, CMA decided to take a look back at all of the awesome educational programming that taught STEM before STEM was even a thing.
Like 3-2-1 Contact.
And Voyage of the Mimi.
And lots of other awesome shows, courtesy of funding from the National Science Foundation. The NSF cut its funding this year, prompting worried chatter from some children’s content creators — but the folks on CMA’s “3-2-1 Contact to Minecraft: The Evolution of STEM Programming” panel on Monday, January 27 weren’t worried.
They were excited to turn kids into scientists.
Our lovely panel of experts – Carl Wynter (American Museum of Natural History), Sandra Shepherd (WNET), Carla Seal Wanner (Climate Cartoons), and Harold Moss (FlickerLab) – shared about their experiences creating educational programming that was both entertaining and accurate. After they all shared about some of their greatest successes, Moderator Dr. Margaret Honey (New York Hall of Science) kicked things off by asking about core principles that each kept in mind for audience engagement.
There they are!
Sandra shared about how Cyberchase was just as committed to character and narrative as much as it was to teach math skills. Math is always essential to saving the day in world of Cyberchase (and she showed us a clip to prove it), but she stressed the importance of keeping your content and your narrative in sync. If you’ve got characters that aren’t mirroring the way kids actually learn, or you’re missing a character with a point of view that the audience can relate to (which they initially were), then you need to build that in.
Carla jumped off that point to discuss her experiences with Voyage of the Mimi, encouraging media makers to show characters with different learning styles. Model different ones and show different perspectives. Kids don’t all learn the same; neither should the characters they learn from. She also shared some great tidbits about how external forces shaped Mimi’s content – like how it was half episodic drama and half documentary because it was cheaper than doing either full-length format, and how they created 11-minute episodes to meet teachers’ need for classroom-appropriate length material.
Dr. Honey threw Sam Gibbons’ infamous “If it smells like PBS, they’ll flee,” maxim to the panel and asked how they managed it in informal learning settings (i.e. – not being in school). Sandra opened up on behalf of PBS, stating that kids ALWAYS like learning. Always. And it’ll be fun if the content they’re learning from is both engaging and relevant to the kids themselves.
Carl tackled the generalization that media people were fearful of science as a way of thinking in his answer. He knew it was a generalization, and clarified it as such, but also cited it as a very real drawback in his experience. Most content creators treat science “as a bauble,” he said, a shiny gimmick to add to their show. Children are sensitive to that stuff – and they know when it’s being sugarcoated. More than anything, he wants writers and producers to think that science “doesn’t taste icky” and is worthy of being content in its own right.
The audience ate that up.
See? Hanging on every word!
That answer broached a question about using transmedia to create scientists and Harold jumped all over it. He agreed with Sandra’s earlier point about writing the story around the topic (and making characters work in multiple mediums to maximize learning), and elaborated that getting kids to understand content is more than transmitting facts to them: it’s about making the information immediately available in a hands-on way that gets them excited to use it. That kind of engagement teaches kids to experiment, fail and defend their thoughts – aka, SCIENTIST STUFF.
Carla encouraged the room to think about what hooks they had in the material – and, most encouragingly, do things with the camera that the human eye can’t. The room agreed with that one – and Sandra chimed in with testing your content early and often. Even the pilot. Building your audience’s feedback into your process from the beginning ensures a better product in the end.
Dr. Honey wrapped up her questions by asking about funding. “We’ve stayed alive and that’s saying a lot. And we’ve done lots of stuff we love.” That’s how Carla summarized it, and it rang true of the entire panel. She encouraged everyone to not always go for the big funding opportunities – and Harold added to that by explaining that more companies are going after the same small pool of funding. There’s less to go around – but be creative. Education is privatized now. Companies are interested in educational content, and there’s a political angle to be exploited there in terms of funding content… but with greater funding opportunities come greater responsibilities to make a good product. “It requires us to be advocates of what’s actually good for kids,” Harold concluded. “And we should be.”
Yet another instance of Spiderman logic applying to real life
Sometimes you can’t do that (Carla admitted she and Harold had both walked away from work), but you can still create content that will allow kids to build, share and defend fact-based opinions with their peers. Those critical thinking skills may not make them scientists – but it will absolutely make them better people.
And sometimes they’ll learn statistics to interpret their results – as Carl shared about a SimAnt experiment
The conversation than switched to audience questions, which got dominated by hatred of Minecraft as an educational tool (it isn’t), CTW, and the results of the recent CUNY study. However, someone asked why this content was not available for older kids and the entire room was flummoxed. Carl offered, “I think science is not cool anymore,” while Carla pointed out that preschoolers are a more captive audience and the inroad for older kids is mobile, Sandra reminded us that other countries actually DO have that content. She wrapped the evening up by giving us the biggest encouragement of all: “If you build it, and it’s great, then the audience is already there.”
In short, “As media makers, we have the ability to make this stuff engaging and exciting,” as Carla put it. And we can.
So get to it!
Children's Media Association 