digital walk i was doing was in cd rom and we've moved on a little bit since then so i always have to stay stay current so it's a constant light lifelong learning adventure for me and my team as well r radio stations p b s public broadcasting stations and with and we are the boston public t v station as a as a local entity but we're also a national producer of a lot of content you  and you might recognize some of these brands especially has been around for where and i think season twenty two he's still in third grade  we're aiming all the way up to the twenty fifth season so we tend to have to look a few years out because of funding partly because of how long it takes to make television  shows and i should say you know we're such a small group i'm happy for you to ask questions as we go i've got a bunch of pictures here i'm going to be talking about i have a gross script and i'm happy to stop so so we produce a lot of content and that's when it comes and that's that's television that's digital that educational materials for informal and formal spaces for a lot  them funded projects and national science foundation funded and they by definition research projects so we've often got an external research partner trying to show learning outcomes or africa see about some aspect of research based as a project around helping low income adults primarily from other countries who may have very little english to find them in the settings where they may be learning english or taking a ged but also trying to introduce them to learning science with their kids so it's an intergenerational multi lingual efforts to try and bridge some of those different  gaps and people's experience along the way have them playing games or making activity real world kind of craft activities science activities with their kids as well as communicating with their kids and helping build their english skills so that's a research project as well as a production project as an example another research project we have multi year one is about the use of the effective use of tablets in the classroom and doing preschool math so very focused it's as much about the teacher experiences as around the kids experience we've got projects on computational thinking engineering informational t a whole range of kind of academic pursuits applied with the curriculum and curriculum advisors and the main expertise that we bring in as we make television shows animation live action and from my pov games apps websites and the supporting content that goes out to adults and kids  is a snapshot of how my team looks last time we were able to take a snapshot most of the moves still there's some people who have moved to other towns or cities things change but it broadly speaking we're a small production digital production house of about fifteen to twenty people at any given time developers designers project manager as right as produces or working in the house environment it's not as glamorous as google and some of those places we have to pay for food and things like that but we try to get away from the cube farms and the typical for offices including typical for some of the positive g b h but we kind of welcome the open space also kind of the standing desk some of those kinds of things just help my back but it also helps us be able to talk to our although we have done some other projects in some other languages it's usually of funding decision whether that's even available as an option because it's more walk this was a suite of games that we did with department education funding that we're all focused on math for the k y unlevel different numbers and counting games have very narrowly focused and then we've found funding subsequently to translate everything into  spanish so we sometimes do that as a debate about whether that's a good idea or not because often as you know kids may be learning english and they may want english more than they want the spanish but sometimes the parents might you know th a different design challenge and a different production challenge often spanish for example is about a third longer than english when you write it so if you've got written texts you have to make different allowances where you've squeezed your content into something that is visible on the phone we have to think about desktop computers phone sizes all points in between as well as all the different technology and platforms and software versions of all of those things that exist  generally speaking we're trying to be up to date but we're all ways backwards looking as well because we don't want to leave behind people haven't bought the latest i  know for the last project we walked home we actually had to go on e bay to buy the devices to test against that we know was still showing up in in the data we look at the analytics where we see who's using at cons and we see this through enough people using this that we need to make sure it works on these older devices so we really do make the effort to think about access we think about data plans where would produce the mobile content we really kind of have to be forward looking and backwards looking at the same time and and find a bounce i should say w g b h is a nonprofit or an educational foundation mission based you know so there's a lot of we try to bring a lot of into what we're doing and commitment to the communities that we serve which for the most part cross the united states and occasionally further afield we have a few global projects know don't apologize i've got terrible hearing to i say i've got terrible listening and i don't know if there's the same thing is that better ok so most of my work is for younger middle and high this was an opportunity that i found funding for as part of a documentary that was being made in our adult long form documentary strand american experience this was about true  students that also had a kind of a it was digital so it was a graphic novel to tell a story and then the kids could lean into some of the experiments and test the bones for radium poisoning these the c s i kind of idea of looking at scientific evidence to help solve crimes so this was a great way for us to approach biochemistry for high school we had biochemistry this is a vi headset so it obscures everything you see everything we produce is fills your field of vision in three sixty and we're walking with microsoft support and with nas content we were on a multi year project working with nasa so we're marrying the two with an exploration of the search for water in the solar system in the middle and high school where they'll be an experience in pot where the explorer the student with the headset and then part was in the classroom was adjacent but without the headset who acting as if their mission control so that data collecting or making decisions feeding them back and forth were trying to create a classroom experience where they maybe just one low and many low cost but high fidelity working more on other projects around what it means to use the technology that we give our kids what are the good things the bad things how should they navigate how do we manage data privacy and misinformation and advertising and all of those things that as parents we worry about as kids we want our kids to be able to navigate and i'd be happy to talk about this at length but i switching gears to the main area that i want to talk about which is kids and how we think about this some of this coming the conversation that i have with any was about you know how do we keep kids engage with learning so this i have two daughters as and one with kids all know kids are all very different this was from of a few years ago so my references this was a i had from a couple years ago so you'll see the reference is a little dated but the point i'm trying to make is still stands so one likes drawing read the help and she was twelve good grades degrees to do in college whether that's prevented or environmental science and the point i'm trying to make is there's a balance here it's great for kids to have technology if we can manage the time they spend on it and what they're doing to make sure they've got opportunities to do other things so a lot of what i'm thinking about is is is about balance and that includes for the some of my peers at home because we can see nice so a lot of this is about parenting  we give in school or after school it's just trying to find that that balance in life and we try to do that in the work that we do so here as i jump into some project like many documentaries a real kids with an environmental science curriculum these roll kind of tied to n g s says in the only appropriate standards we have a lot of advisory input on what should go into plumbs photo one so we send kids out they have the phone they call up it's a mission that essentially awesome to look for the kinds of things that you see on the right these should be things they can find on a year in any place whether they're in fairbanks or they're in san jose and whether it's raining and snowing the we're trying to make an opportunity for them to do some science in korean to think building a journalist saves to their thoroughness they want to save things but they can also submit content to the website and so the photos that they choose to send come to us they're rouged by humans that's actually names nothing that is a picture of like this is my school and this is my house meaning this is where you can find me so it's we don't publish anything that transgress is that and and what it gives kids is both a way to to be an explorer tests and direction to have the option to write or take pictures of what they're doing and to be published and these go right on to the home page of the website and then they say so they can see all of those and we get we we get a lot we try to keep them by category so we give them some structure a little bit of scaffolding you know these are designed to be kids by themselves so there's not a parent for example and if i can read it that the thing on the right is an example of a screenshot from the website and that's from charlotte age six i found a big cloud i light big clouds they look  my sister avery so so there's an opportunity if kids want to write something they can they can write something and we try to keep we don't do a lot of spell checking these these are authentic things from kids  part the publishing helps then model for the kids who come next because we're trying to model the kinds of things that we want so we want pictures of outdoors we don't pictures of your rec room when we say  our parents are comfortable it saves your camera roll parents can find it if they feel a device it's an unexpected byproduct is that there was suddenly a big uptake of these from china as i was hearing a lot of pictures of everyday pictures i've taken so as we switch gears here is another app that we developed that was for a different project where we were getting kids to look for materials it was a materials science curriculum again it was a photograph app and this is us testing it's in one of the local after school programs we do a lot of local testing because we want authentic feedback from kids while we're making stuff so that we can make things better and actually what you see here the adults that you see are actually from my team says that is that two of the programmers one of the designers so we try to take the whole team out not everyone has kids so it's great to get a team experience of what it is for to be around a six year old you guys have it all day long and not everyone is blessed in that way so it's good to see how kids think what they want to do for us is when we're designing is like do they know what to do  what instructions they need that kind of thing and again opportunity had to go inside or outside with this project we were asking kids to look for different materials to then fill up different pictures whether it was about things science inquiry here's one of our pictures from testing and this is one of these outdoor apps is actually a child in the in the bush was a great example for us we gave  the phone she were asking you have to look for things in nature on the you know next thing she's she's right up close exploring this is just in that in the in the garden by high school so we really do kind of get kids we've got a whole project associated with palm landing currently it's kind of an r x programmer so you can prescribe to go outside and we've got some relationships with national organizations that help you do that  is a piece about this recently in boston magazine and has some screenshots from some of the materials that are the focus for adults so you get a sense that we've got things broken down by category which is still keeping it bright and lively it's not just dry and hopefully not boring for the for these adults who are trying to keep everyone in gauged this is some of what this may look like could create a creature with different adaptations different question what would they do with those shot claws what would they do with that those small wings so we're thinking about reflection we're not expecting to answer it where it would just put in that question in the head so when they're thinking about improve so this was a and not that again has kids outside doing these missions but we've come to try to time them and pass them over different days and kind of have a way that you can do them with your family when you're just walking to school or at the bus stop like fish because a big fish can get in so in the animation there was a story about they hiding in this shot comes you can see kind of congress through the small small gaps on the website we build a game way you're acting as a as a fish that has to avoid the predators and you've got safety in the roots but that part was in the education group knew the a lot of classroom playgrounds have these  case to be thinking about what it means to be growing in the mangrove so we would always try to make those real well connections with kids as well as make everything kind of appropriate to the platform where making content f in this case we've got video we've got games and we've got outdoor activities another project that we've just launched is the rough rough one show a character that we had in the show for five years called fetch with reborn in this case as a digital only property with again that kind of mix that i talked about before animation and live action and  games of different kinds i can show you just i think call it up a the intro you'll get a sense of kind of the ties together but along the way has to experiment with different things whether it's all of the things that don't walk before you find something that does so there's a there's a science in creepy says the show's  experimental testing and rebuilding and the one piece of that going back to this idea of getting kids outside is we've also got door activities that go with this here we build a game play with materials for the easily found we've got the instructions in english and spanish and this is a game again to test the material strength of things so we have kids in a relay race and they have to run holding toilet paper without it breaking and then they've got to run with ten fall without it breaking but maybe they can twist it and they can go faster if they make it stronger so it's we're giving them different things to hold on to but they can go to fos of the wise little break so would we devise the game where you have to walk out the strength of something or its properties in order to understand what you can do with it which is obviously a big piece of  what it takes a lot of about materials and whether the if you want to become an engineer or in this case if you want to win a race so we've tried to build activities again that would be good some right to it is a number of them are out there also they could kind of very available online you'll find it on you tube in english and spanish it's aimed at younger kids it's got a stem curriculum and again we've produced a lot of content easy activities to do  outside again with the same kind of thought and scaffolding for i'll see with their kids whether they're in formal settings in formal settings or some of those kind of home daycare settings where there might be parents sharing looking at responsibilities looking after kids i give you a sense of of what that looks like with another video so we do these mini documentaries to go with this animation to tells a similar story but these live action things are like we'll kids doing real things animation live action is is outside another project that i put together so a smaller one it wasn't as big as author on some of those other ones that are much more familiar this is the greens where we had the opportunity to do a project around environmental thinking and a little bit more about the world of recycling and reuse and some of those other so only a size project more about behavioral change and getting kids to notice and understand what was going on around them so this we ran for a number of years and it was largely modeled on my older daughter i mentioned the younger one who was very much into green living and again we were trying to model  the real world but with carrots as that would appeal and give kids some sim connection as we think about as we hadn't think about what it meant to save electricity or to be outside looking for things in nature order to look for fresh fruit or to see things sensually had we kind of run the gamut of kind of green green topics as well as evangelizing projects that trash and we also wanted to show kids what it was like around the world so we were able to show kids pictures from other parts of the world again as a way to model behavior and show that we're part of a bigger community  i'll show you an animation from that these wish all kind of based around short animations  here because there's another one about kind of getting kids outside so i just chose this one there's a whole suite of them and they're on their own the website in in book form here top left are these ideas of grit and how to make kids succeed richard lugar made a big case for getting kids outside the last child in the woods was just his plea to turn often and get outside and there's also movement reflected here in this picture from the atlantic of a move back towards a lot of the playgrounds that and some of these are pretty extreme it's like ok well you can light a fire over there but just don't burn everything down you know there's a sense that this is of some level of supervision but nothing like you would say in an american classroom where you have all kinds of constraints not least of which it's parents access to law as so you know there's a there's just a different philosophy underlying those but there's definitely a movement  that you know different parents may embrace about just even just letting their kids get to see or letting their kids explore and and some of those are you know real concerns about traffic or of the dangers some of them are about whether they want to do more laundry like every parent is going to find their own comfort level i definitely know that i was that kid to some point  so i appreciate that and we've tried to give our own kids that opportunity if they if they wanted like i said at the beginning it was a it's about finding out about this and a lot of it as is what you're comfortable with as a parent and sometimes it's what you're uncomfortable with but you'll tolerate i mean it's not about you just being covering your kids in bubble wrap and keeping them safe you know it's hot and then the expression of how hard it is is that older kid who was the model for the greens is now walking in that mangrove in southeast asia she graduated in marine science last may she's been gone since january she's been working indonesia where she was the last two summers she's working in thailand right now in the mangroves which is why i tend to know more about man grows in other trees you know here you can't quite see it but you know when they're doing field walk ups when they're doing field work they kind of swim out a wait out with their packs on the hads to keep them which is bees as well as the memories of so you know you kind of you have to be careful what you wish for you give your kids the spirit of the out there was and then they'd moved the other side of the planet free any amount of time you know we keep up on whatsapp and you know other internet things when she has access but that's kind of the plus side of encouraging your kids to go outside in the summer and that's you know i there's plenty i could talk about will show you how i'm moving away from the bike for that matter h like the pressure for us comes did ever have a question it was like do we feel like we need to do most stem freshet to some extent is a financial one where we have to fund every project on its own to stand on its own historically we've been successful in getting stem funding more than virtues of generosity humility those kinds of things this kind of unusual funding compared to the more straightforward stem funding that if everything is competitive you're competing with administration's priorities are we tend to work on a lot of projects so we need a lot of funding and we often spend a lot of time looking for funding a few years out as well as doing the production so goes to p b s kids p b s because there's a lot of great resources that are organized exactly i suggest by age all by scale so you can think of why are my where do i want to do english oh i've got a third grader you know so you can sort of different ways that they have for the schools the p b s learning media platform as it has that in spades a lot of filters that you can put to search for stuff typically a lot of our stuff is kind of kid powered so the kid knows that brandon is looking for activities whether it's wild crafts which is also we don't produce out but they're in all some set of resources for the while krauts all the stuff that we produce is kind of age targeted so if you if you're the kind of kid that watches on strong t v then you'll find age appropriate content on the website if you're the kind of teenager that watches a t v then we don't have as much for you you can go on twitter with everyone or any other questions yes ok so so the public broadcasting in america dates back i think to the seventy's and if you haven't seen it is a fabulous congressional go the new hampshire you know so that's the footprint of of how you as a local television watch or a local consumer finds that content and a lot of that is kind of brokered through and then  as a publisher and sometimes up fund well we may bring them a project we funded somewhere else and if they like it and they want to produce it publish it they'll do that so the plum landing apps were largely funded by the national science foundation produced by us but they got a p b s kids logo on because they're on the p b s kids channels in the app stores and you'll find that you'll find the content on p b s kids on the website or on the streaming platforms like hulu or chrome cross any of those organizationally the analogy i like to use is more like a coral reef so at a distance it looks like one thing in close up uses lots of different organizations lots of different organisms so you know i watched you know i have many series of mad men by getting netflix d v d s through the mail when that was their thing i didn't even know it was on amc had put all this money into it because i didn't watch television to get it so a google made this it used to be a o l made this like people don't understand also distribution and who made things and that's an important piece when you do in the media literacy things like who made this and why they make it for you i mean you shouldn't have to worry about it you know local membership of a local station gets you all of that content or it comes for free and you don't have to be a know editorial we've got news rooms we've got radio rooms we've got live production we've got you know a lot of different businesses p b s has a lot of technical and design stuff but they don't make as much they don't really make their own stuff we we make all they buy them or other stations to to see a particular episode sometimes we'll make a game that goes with an episode and that's kind of fun but we don't you we don't require that you've seen this in order to understand that the goal for a lot of us and not just in public t v but to anyone making media but if you do both they should feel like they're from the same space in a marvel talks about their marvel universe it's not just the movies it's the same as in the comics you want the character to have the same traits the same behaviors the same backstory you  want something to be true over here and false over here because then it's like ok why doesn't make sense you want to build a cohesion for us also making digital content more often working with the assets the animation the drawing yes so the themes come from character and story you know wherever you find out they still govern annoying little sister and the curriculum is the same with the under the educational and the panic so like i said awesome for the most part has got a social emotional curriculum fitted together and that we fill gaps from one year that we left in the previous so that we were building a library a resource that held together the teachers that wanted to use it across th reading skills reading writing listening speaking all the kind of cold literacy skills so we try to build cohesion within the education was a curriculum and with the characters and then visually and with sound so that every kind of matches when you see peep which was the live action thing with the kids of the stream all of the animation that we have access to all of those files of the files that we make a games out over the same we don't we're not redrawing anything we're changing it and like and think about a lot of things but so we because all those things equate to cost or time or both and they're all of a premium as is yours you've given me a lot of y