Project Description
Educational content that keeps pace with viewers
When designing material for broadcast or any screen you need seen, content is obviously important. But pacing is the critical ingredient that often gets left out of the mix. We designed and launched an educational TV show geared toward middle school-aged kids, called The STEM Journals, that championed education and career paths in the disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math for 3 seasons. The show actually had a great appeal to general audiences of all ages because we approach educational content with an “inverted pyramid” of information – working from the general toward the specific, which is how people learn. Even in educational television, you’re not really going to teach anyone anything in 30 minutes or less – you’re trying to stimulate their curiosity to learn more, so you cannot spend too much time on the basics. When aiming at young audiences who watch content online that often lasts less than 15 seconds, that ramps up the challenge and the need to move quickly but cohesively. When we tackled the subject of rocks – one of nature’s great building blocks – we knew terms like igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic would be flying around so we designed this quick guide and asked one of our favorite geologists, Dr. Sian Proctor, to walk us through. Briskly.
Sian is the first African American woman to pilot a spacecraft as a crew member of Space X Inspiration4.
