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Meet the Gulls: Hamburger, French Fry, and Spud

Hellooo readers! My name is Spud. I’m a herring gull chick that lives on the garden roof of the Boston Children’s Museum (right outside the window of FableVision Studios), and I was born just a couple of weeks ago!

Here's our mom nesting. 

Seagulls typically lay three eggs. One, two, three. That would be my siblings, Hamburger and French Fry and myself! Just like all seagull clutches, Burger and Frenchie hatched first, within a few hours of each other. The third egg (that’s me!) typically hatches a day later, and that chick is smaller than the other two.

Our story started when our seagull parents, Mr. and Mrs. Herring, formed a pair and built a nest on the rooftop garden. They do this every year! They work together to take care of the eggs, and now they take turns feeding us, too. Today for lunch, Dad regurgitated a great mush of small fish and invertebrates from the ocean. Yummmmmmy!

After lunch, Burger, Frenchie, and I practiced walking. It’s really difficult walking around on these big feet! I fall over a lot. My tiny wings aren’t big enough yet to help me balance. When rain rolls in, Mom fusses over us till we get back in the nest and she sits on us to keep us cozy and dry. Soon though, I’ll be big enough to hang out in the rain without getting too chilled. When the weather is nice, I’ll take a nap with my siblings in the grass or rocks. Our spotted feathers camouflage us so well, that we blend right into the roof!

Mom says that we’ll be getting big enough to fly soon. Our flight feathers are already growing in, and I’ll be flying for the first time in about a month! I’m so excited! After I’m big enough to fly away, Mom and Dad will still help care for me and my siblings for half a year. And even then, Burger and Frenchie and I won’t look like Mom and Dad until we’re two years old. So until then, we’re stuck with these spots. I really like them though!

People on the floor above love to stare at us through the windows. They get waaaay too excited when we poop. Or eat things. Or flap our wings. What is the deal with them...

Seagull art by Taryn Johnson

Seagull art by Taryn Johnson

Post written by Taryn Johnson, Production Artist and Animator, and Hannah O'Neal, Artist and Animator. Photos and videos by Bill Gonzalez, Producer. 

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D2D Fund and FableVision Turn the Tables on Financial Fraud

Put on your disguise and channel your inner con artist in FableVision’s newly-developed financial literacy game Con ‘Em If You Can! FableVision worked with the Doorway to Dreams (D2D) Fund in association with the FINRA Investor Education Foundation to create this sleuthy game. 

In Con ’Em If You Can, the player assumes the role of a con artist learning key techniques – phantom riches, reciprocity, scarcity, social consensus, and source credibility – to scam the residents of peaceful Shady Acres. The intention is that by playing as the con artist, the user learns how not to fall for the schemes in the real world. Connor, a “friendly” con artist and host of Con Art School, guides the player in crafting the correct strategy to persuade the victim into forking over the money. The player sorts through their bag of tricks for the various schemes to take down targets. But beware; Agent Hunter is hot on the trail. 

Con ’Em If You Can adds to the list of fun and engaging financial literacy games that FableVision has collaborated on with D2D. In Bite Club, the first-ever vampire-themed financial literacy game, players learn how to save for eternal retirement by managing their own nightclub. In Farm Blitz, farmer Kyra helps players get out of a sticky situation and turn their inherited farm into a cash-making machine. And in Refund Rush, players take on the role of a financial planner, giving customers advice on how to best spend their tax refund check based on their financial profile. Players learn how to use their refund to invest in bonds and pay off debt rather than spend it on luxury items. D2D is known for their game arsenal that approaches financial literacy from a non-traditional point of view.  

Test your skill! Try your hand at reeling in the big one on the game’s FableVision-designed website here. You can also check out FINRA’s facts and figures about the importance of fraud awareness. Remember, knowing your enemy is the best way protect yourself.

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Good Thinking! A New Approach to Professional Development for Science Educators

Post written by Jean Flanagan, a Science Education Research Specialist at Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) and a project lead for the Good Thinking! animated web series. You can read the original post on SSEC’s STEMVisions blog. 

Subscribe to SSEC's YouTube channel to stay up-to-date on the series! 

Findings from science education research rarely make their way into classroom practice. As I’ve discussed before on the PLOS Sci-Ed blog, there are a lot of entrenched barriers that continue to separate these efforts. For one, most science education research is still primarily published in journal articles that are often difficult to access — and always dense, lengthy reads. Additionally, teacher professional development (PD) workshops, often developed in conjunction with researchers and intended to bridge this gap, are costly and time-intensive to implement. While these programs are often important and meaningful experiences, logistics still limit their reach.

Ever since I first got involved with science education research, I have been increasingly disturbed by this disconnect. That’s why I was incredibly excited when our Associate Director of Curriculum and Communications here at SSEC, Marjee Chmiel, approached me with the preliminary plans for the Good Thinking! project.

THE IDEA
The basic concept was to create short, animated web videos for teachers about research findings on common student misconceptions and other pedagogical topics. Marjee and I had both been inspired by the film A Private Universe and research on student mental models and conceptual change. We had also seen Phil Sadler’s recent findings showing that students of teachers who had both strong content knowledge and strong knowledge of student misconceptions learned more than students of teachers who only had strong content knowledge. Clearly there was a need for PD that helps teachers understand common student ideas and how to work with these ideas in building a more scientific understanding.

THE TEAM
I was already familiar with what many of the most common student ideas were, as I had spent many years working with the team at AAAS Project 2061 developing and researching misconception-based assessment items, conducting literature reviews, student interviews, and analyses of written responses. Marjee had done her dissertation on how science teachers use video to share ideas, and was already formulating a script for a video on the basics of conceptual change theory. We were eager to get started!

However, any animation project is a huge undertaking and we needed a team. Soon we hired a Series Coordinator, Nate Fedrizzi, a conservation biologist with a background in science media, and began lining up content writers and subject matter experts (some of whom had contributed to the research we cited).

We contracted with FableVision, a Boston-based studio, to create the animations for the series. Under the passionate direction of Creative Director Leigh Hallisey and Producer Danielle Gillis, this quickly blossomed into a wonderful creative partnership, and each episode now benefits from the unique perspectives of both science and education writers and animation and entertainment writers.

TEACHERS CAN HAVE FUN TOO!
Yes, they’re animated. And yes, they’re for teachers! Unfortunately in the current policy climate, teachers have a pretty thankless job. There is always “one more thing” being added to their list of responsibilities, and professional development often means taking time out of their summer, or else struggling to find a substitute. Good Thinking! is meant to be respectful of teachers’ time, and to bring a little bit of humor into their days. But beyond being fun, we think animation can be a surprisingly effective medium.

ANIMATION, NARRATIVE, AND DIALOGUE
Another inspiration for our work came from the research of Derek Muller, a science educator and creator of the massively popular Veritasium series. He summarized some of his findings in a video called “Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos”. He found that “content explainer” videos are less effective at teaching new concepts than “dialogue” or “refutation” videos, which explicitly include and address common student misconceptions or perspectives and work through why those ideas are inaccurate or need refining.

As Nate mentioned in an earlier STEMVisions post, digital technologies have the potential to move beyond traditional lecture-based approaches. We envisioned animation as an opportunity to visualize something teachers can only dream of — the inside of their students’ brains! (A scary thought perhaps, but one with real pedagogical value.) By using this conceit we can convey research findings on common alternative mental models, and then use narrative — a story about the focal teacher and her students — to work through the finer points of uncovering and addressing them in the classroom. We also use animation to explore scientific phenomena that are too big, small, fast, or slow to demonstrate with live filming, like the causes of the seasons, or the relationship between cells and atoms.

As far as we know, Good Thinking! is the first substantial effort to translate science education research findings from journal articles into an animated format. Our team, and the teachers we’ve worked with so far, are very excited about the result, but we also recognize that this series is an experiment. We look forward to receiving feedback and hope to have the opportunity to refine our process and develop more episodes – the list of important topics and useful findings is always growing!

REFERENCES
AAS Project 2061 Science Assessment. (2011). http://assessment.aaas.org/

Muller, D. A., Sharma, M. D., & Reimann, P. (2008). Raising cognitive load with linear multimedia to promote conceptual change. Science Education, 92(2), 278–296.

Muller, D. A., Sharma, M. D., Eklund, J., & Reimann, P. (2007). Conceptual change through vicarious learning in an authentic physics setting. Instructional Science, 35(6), 519–533.

Muller, D. A., Bewes, J., Sharma, M. D., & Reimann, P. (2007). Saying the wrong thing: improving learning with multimedia by including misconceptions. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 24(2), 144–155.

Schneps, M., & Sadler, P. M. (1989). A private universe [Video]. Santa Monica, CA: Pyramid Film and Video.

Sadler, P. M., Sonnert, G., Coyle, H. P., Cook-Smith, N., & Miller, J. L. (2013). The influence of teachers’ knowledge on student learning in middle school physical science classrooms. American Educational Research Journal, 50(5), 1020-1049.

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A Hop Across the Pond for Fforde Ffiesta

At FableVision, storytelling comes in many forms – animations, games, websites, comics…the list tends to grow with each new project. It’s good to step outside our own walls, however, and see how other people are embracing creative storytelling in formats both familiar and foreign. Conveniently I recently got a chance to do just that.

For years, my parents and I have attended the vaguely-annual Fforde Ffiesta in Swindon, England. But this time, we had a special detour to make beforehand: Alice’s Adventures Underground.

Housed in the tunnels and vaults beneath Waterloo Station in the middle of London, Alice’s Adventures Underground is not so much a retelling of Alice in Wonderland as it is a brand new interactive adventure that takes place in the same world with the same characters (as well as some extra ones). It’s an experience that, in the first ten (out of about 90) minutes, leads you through an immaculately-detailed study, squeezes you down corridors entirely covered in loose book pages and then, just to keep you on your toes, asks you what number it’s thinking of.

During the rest of my journey, I was directed by the Cheshire Cat to spy on other attendees through a hole in a fuzzy wall, serenaded by the Mock Turtle during a rainstorm, and wheeled around on a luggage cart by an over-caffeinated March Hare (portrayed in this Wonderland as a flapper). Through the whole thing, the cast of characters chattered eagerly in fits of roundabout logic that would make Charles Dodgson proud. Eventually, the story came to a climax in the Red Queen’s Court, and the whole group was released into the royal bar, where we were met with colorful cocktails and live music.

The next day, it was off to Swindon for the Ffiesta – a small convention put on for (and by) fans of author Jasper Fforde. Attended by about 200 people, it featured such events as an audience-participation version of Richard III, a game show called “Evade the Question” and a reading by Jasper himself from his upcoming novel. If you’ve read any of his books, you might be familiar with Jasper’s fondness for literary jokes and repurposings (the thermodynamic inconsistency of the Three Bears’ porridge, for example, was a major plot point in one of his Nursery Crime entries). That fondness carries over to his fan base, driving attendees to good-natured yet sharp competition in a poetry contest, a radio-play-writing challenge, and a talent show. The winner of the latter event had turned the plot of Macbeth into a full-length rap song. Meanwhile, an unexpectedly powerful last-minute entry involved a woman reciting Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to and with her grandson.

The trip was short, but invigorating. I loved having the chance to experience so many narrative-based events – great reminders that there are always more ways than you expect to immerse yourself in a good story.

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June FableFriday: Gary Goldberger, President and Co-Founder

“I like to get my hands dirty. Sometimes I know just enough to be dangerous,” Gary Goldberger, FableVision’s president said as he laughed. “Don’t put that in. Okay, fine, you can leave it in.”

As a sculpture and physics student at Clark University, Gary wanted to be an animatronics artist and make robots for movies. He’s a self-proclaimed Star Wars geek and even wrote George Lucas a note when he was younger trying to get an internship. Years later he did the same cold-call reach out to Paul Reynolds at CF Video (Paul is now FableVision’s CEO) – but unlike Lucas, Paul took his call.

A college-aged Gary showed up for his interview at CF Video in what is always described in FableVision lore as “the world’s most wrinkled green suit.”

“As a college student, I wasn’t wearing a lot of suits—that was my only one. And I had purple hair…I’m pretty sure everyone thought I was a ‘little bit off’—luckily, Paul saw past the suit and the hair.” Gary’s video chronicling the adventures of a group of oranges captured Paul’s imagination, and Gary started a six-month internship at CF Video that turned into a year and a half.

Paul introduced Gary to his twin brother, Peter H. Reynolds, who at the time was working at Tom Snyder Productions. “My collaboration with the Reynolds brothers really solidified when I met Pete – he would dream something up and I would make it happen. And we’ve been doing that for the past 18 years.”

One of Gary’s all-time favorite collaborations with Pete was on the award-winning animated film The Blue Shoe, a sweet and emotionally-stirring love story between an unlikely pair: a Blue Shoe and a Green Boot. “We worked nights and weekends for months in between our regular client work to make this film because we loved the story – it was a true labor of love. I am just as proud of it today as I was almost 20 years ago.”  

Gary was a founding member of FableVision when it was created in 1996. For over 18 years, FableVision has been a media development studio on a 200-year mission to move the world to a better place through story, media, and technology.

“We haven’t outgrown that mission but we have grown in our capabilities and reach, and have found other people to join that mission,” he said. “Everyone here wants to be here and believes in the mission. That’s part of what makes us so special.”

From animation to websites to online games and apps, Gary has a unique perspective into all things FableVision. He serves as executive creative director on many of our projects, oversees the day-to-day running of the Studio, and isn’t afraid to get down-and-dirty on projects. As June’s FableFriday, Gary gives a look at his passions – at the Studio and in the great outdoors.

What is the secret to FableVision’s success, and what do you see for the future?
I truly believe it’s the people that come to FableVision – the talents that they bring, the passions that they have, and the joy they bring to everything they’re working on…that’s why we’ve been successful.

In the beginning we were a bunch of artists running around with a lot of great ideas and intentions but without a ton of organization. We started to see real success once Karen Bresnahan [FableVision’s executive producer] came on and helped us implement production processes. Our project management skills and processes to this day are really tight and well-oiled, and we always strive to find that perfect balance of artistry and efficiency. We are very proud of that.  

Our next chapter is to continue to do the important projects that we’re doing, but to have more reach. We’ve put a strong focus in the past year on building our Original Properties division in television, long-form animation, gaming, and other media. We recently “put out our shingle” to let the world know we are growing with this new direction. We’re building out more capabilities so we can handle larger projects and have even more services for new and existing clients.

You’ve held just about every position at FableVision: artist, animator, developer, creative, even number-cruncher! What kind of insight does that give you into the products we create and the leadership you provide?
We’re a small company and everyone here has to wear multiple hats in one form or another. The upside of my having worked in so many roles over the years is that when people are having challenges, they can come and tap me on the shoulder. Most likely, I’ve faced a similar problem myself and found a solution, even if it might seem a little out of left field. I love sitting with folks and tackling a challenge together, it’s always great to see what different perspectives can bring to the table.

The one downside to having tried my hand at so many different things is that it could be easy to fall into a micro-managing role. But you have to step back and let people do their own thing. I work with amazing people that I trust absolutely. They get things done and they get them done well.

How do you stay on top of new technology?
I am fascinated by new technology, and I love playing with whatever the newest thing is as soon as it comes out – sometimes even before if I can be a Beta tester. My learning time is from the time my family goes to sleep to right until I go to bed. So instead of watching TV, I’ll just be up playing – learning a new programming language, making an app, Beta testing a new database. It sounds geeky saying it out loud, but it’s really fun for me.

If you want to learn something you find the time. I sneak reading tech books, watching video tutorials, or listening to podcasts into little pockets of free time. There are so many different resources out there that there’s nothing you can’t teach yourself.

Let’s talk about talent. Any advice for people looking to work in this industry?
Don’t wait. Just begin. Start with a small project you can finish. If people have something to show what their passion is, something that shows they took initiative and had the drive to follow it through – not even perfectly – that speaks volumes to me.

What makes a good game? What makes a good learning game?
I know a game is good when I can’t stop thinking about it and I have to go back and keep playing it. It doesn’t have to have a multi-million dollar budget or insanely realistic graphics. If I become emotionally invested in a game, that’s a good game. It doesn’t have to be story-based, but if it hits that emotional need, it’s a winner.

I was playing Destiny for a long time with my son, Gordon, and my brother-in-law. So that was an emotional connection outside of the actual game that made us want to play it. When I was at PAX East earlier this year I played Divide by Sheep with my daughter, Tatum, for hours. It is one of the most delightful learning games that I have ever seen. It has a great balance between humor and story and a completely seamless way of integrating learning and action. Honestly, I wish we made that game.

Zoombinis is another game that has everything going for it. Zoombinis has story and then the puzzles are addictive and suck you in. As you go through the game, you realize you are learning the underlying logic concepts. I can’t wait for us to finish developing that game so we can show it off to the world.  

You’re a big hobbyist. What’s on your plate for this summer?
Beekeeping is my new obsession. I count the days until I get to open the hives and see what they've been building. I’ve wanted to keep bees ever since we got our house. My mom got me a beekeeping suit six years ago and I figured, what better reason to wear it? My kids help me too. It’s been great because they’re so fascinated, they’re as excited about it as I am. It’s a whole ecosystem that’s fun to explore together.

I’ve also been into woodworking for a long time. I took some classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. I just made a pine dining room table. My friend had these huge pieces of wood that were so raw you could see the chain saw marks. We each made a table from them. Nick Offerman has this article in Fine Woodworking Magazine—doesn’t everybody read that?—where he made a jig with a router, so we created Nick Offerman’s jig to mill our boards down. We made everything from scratch. It was a fun project. Also, I should mention that I love Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman’s character on Parks and Recreation) SO much.

Favorites:
Games to play with your kids: Settlers of Catan, Agricola, 7 Wonders
Motorcycle: My favorite bike that I’ve had was the Seca 650 – we went cross-country together. I’ve always wanted a Triumph or a Ducati (I have an affinity to the Monster).
Way to take your coffee: Black
Book: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Musician: Bob Dylan
Snack: Beef jerky
Vacation spots: The birth-place of the donut: Camden, Maine. We went there last year, and it was great to spend time unplugged and relaxing with my family. The Poconos are awesome. Newport, RI is an old favorite. Fly-fishing in Montana is really beautiful and peaceful. 

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