ISTE 2015: News from Booth #1300

July 7, 2015

Maybe it was the bright banner encouraging creative educators to connect or the smiling League of FableVisionaries or the hands-on sessions with new products, but FableVision’s ISTE Booth #1300 was THE place to be.

What’s ISTE? Besides a big, fun party? ISTE Conference & Expo is a forum in which educators learn, exchange ideas, and survey the field of education technology. The annual event attracts upwards of 18,000 attendees and industry representatives, including teachers, technology coordinators, administrators, library media specialists, teacher educators, and policy makers. Every year the location changes; this year, we packed our bags and headed to Philadelphia.

ISTE is a huge conference for FableVision. It is a time to connect with the FableVision ambassadors and reignite the flames of creativity. We also get a chance to show off new learning tools for the classroom – like My Awesome Publishing Company and Fab@School Maker Studio. This year our partners at TERC, Dig-It! Games, Classroom, Inc., and Lulu, Jr. joined the FableVision booth for hands-on sessions of their games. All these options made for a diverse booth – one hour you might be helping the Zoombinis along to safety, the other you are on a historical Mayan dig site, the next you’re publishing a book, or getting the scoop in the fictional city of Port Douglas.

ISTE is also a time to recharge and further our mission to tell stories that matter, stories that move. FableVision couldn’t do it without its fans, its educators, its creative rebels. For all the folks that stopped by the booth, thank you for being part of our journey to move the world to a better place! You can see more ISTE photos on our Facebook page.

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Meet the Gulls: Hamburger, French Fry, and Spud

June 26, 2015

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!

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...

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

June 23, 2015

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

June 16, 2015

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.

S ubscribe 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

June 10, 2015

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.