THE ELECTRIC COMPANY
5 p.m. weekdays, WNET/Channel 13
Note: After each episode, log onto PBSKIDSGO.org/ electriccompany
For years, the classic children's show, "The Electric Company" opened with the signature line, "Hey you Guuuuuys!"
That was the verbal cue for school-age kids to gather around the television for some sketch comedy built around developing reading skills.
Now in the reinvented version of the much-heralded PBS show, that famous call is being used to lure kids to another screen — one in which they can create a digital version of themselves and become a character in the program they used to just passively watch.
The folks at Sesame Workshop — the non-profit educational organization that produces "The Electric Company" and its venerable forerunner "Sesame Street" — are calling this new marriage of television and Web a "transmedia experience."
"We are really letting the children be in the driver seat," said Erica Branch-Ridley, supervising producer of online content for "The Electric Company."
"The Electric Company," which aired for six seasons in the 1970s with a cast that included big-name stars Bill Cosby and Rita Moreno, was revamped in 2009 with a new cast and a similar mission of building reading and math skills in kids age 6 to 9.
This third season of the new "Electric Company" begins airing today with episodes that will end with a two-minute animated segment. In the 12 mini-episodes, two animated versions of characters in the cast will battle a villain who is using a "wordsuckeruppernator" to steal all the words on Earth. Each episode ends in a cliffhanger, with the characters shouting the show's famous catch phrase and a narrator telling kids to log onto PBSKIDSGO.org/electriccompany, to join the adventure.
Kids who decide to follow the story from the little screen to the littler screen are asked to design an avatar that looks like them — even choosing their own skin color. Producers say the interactive games are designed to build kids' math literacy by reinforcing the meaning of words like "graph," "measure" "scale" and "prove."
While PBS Kids has long had a website featuring games and activities connected to its programs — as do Disney, Nickelodeon and other children's networks — this is the first time the public broadcaster has attempted to create a virtual world that puts kids in the middle of the storyline. Such virtual worlds are now common in kids' play, having been popularized by Web-game sites such as Webkinz and Club Penguin.
Karen Fowler, the show's executive producer, calls the jump from television program to virtual Web game a "natural progression" for Sesame Workshop to make in trying to create educational programs for a generation of "digital natives."
"Kids are growing up in a media world that is incredibly available and fluid," Fowler said.
There are some, however, who question whether this new cross-platform strategy of trying to bring kids from the TV to the computer and back again is the proper role for PBS, long considered by parents as a trusted source of educational programming.
"This is really playing with dynamite," said Robert Kesten, president of the Screen-Time Institute of AFTAB, formerly known as America's Future Through Academic Progress.
Kesten is one of the promoters of Screen-Free Week, an annual event every April aimed at convincing families to unplug TVs and other media for a full week so they rediscover the joys of non-electronic entertainment.
Besides having qualms about a program that encourages kids to go from one sedentary activity — watching TV — to another — sitting in front of a computer, Kesten said he's disturbed by the creation of a virtual "Electric Company" that he fears kids could become too immersed in.
"The thing we really don't know is what the long-term impact is," Kesten said. "For a child it's much more difficult to distinguish programs from commercials and to draw lines between what's real and what isn't real."
Kesten criticizes the move as a means for the network to hold onto its share of the child audience in the face of growing competition.
The non-profit foundation was not primarily motivated by the desire to hold onto viewers and certainly supports the goal of making sure kids don't spend too much of their days on the couch, Fowler said. But its research has found that these new technologies can serve as a "new portal for education" — one that is more interactive than passively watching TV, she said.
Others who study the cultural impact of digital media are crediting PBS for recognizing that it needed to update its educational programming to fit the times.
A 2009 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children between 8 and 18 were using entertainment media an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes per day — a total that sounded a lot of alarm bells, particularly in light of the nation's obesity crisis. But one of the co-authors of the study — Professor Donald Roberts, professor emeritus in the department of communication at Stanford University — said it makes more sense to focus on improving content and on coaching parents to set limits than it does to hope that kids' appetite for new types of entertainment media will somehow decrease.
"I have to applaud 'Electric Company' for saying, 'OK, the technology is here. How do I put it to good use?' "
5 p.m. weekdays, WNET/Channel 13
Note: After each episode, log onto PBSKIDSGO.org/ electriccompany
For years, the classic children's show, "The Electric Company" opened with the signature line, "Hey you Guuuuuys!"
That was the verbal cue for school-age kids to gather around the television for some sketch comedy built around developing reading skills.
Now in the reinvented version of the much-heralded PBS show, that famous call is being used to lure kids to another screen — one in which they can create a digital version of themselves and become a character in the program they used to just passively watch.
The folks at Sesame Workshop — the non-profit educational organization that produces "The Electric Company" and its venerable forerunner "Sesame Street" — are calling this new marriage of television and Web a "transmedia experience."
"We are really letting the children be in the driver seat," said Erica Branch-Ridley, supervising producer of online content for "The Electric Company."
"The Electric Company," which aired for six seasons in the 1970s with a cast that included big-name stars Bill Cosby and Rita Moreno, was revamped in 2009 with a new cast and a similar mission of building reading and math skills in kids age 6 to 9.
This third season of the new "Electric Company" begins airing today with episodes that will end with a two-minute animated segment. In the 12 mini-episodes, two animated versions of characters in the cast will battle a villain who is using a "wordsuckeruppernator" to steal all the words on Earth. Each episode ends in a cliffhanger, with the characters shouting the show's famous catch phrase and a narrator telling kids to log onto PBSKIDSGO.org/electriccompany, to join the adventure.
Kids who decide to follow the story from the little screen to the littler screen are asked to design an avatar that looks like them — even choosing their own skin color. Producers say the interactive games are designed to build kids' math literacy by reinforcing the meaning of words like "graph," "measure" "scale" and "prove."
While PBS Kids has long had a website featuring games and activities connected to its programs — as do Disney, Nickelodeon and other children's networks — this is the first time the public broadcaster has attempted to create a virtual world that puts kids in the middle of the storyline. Such virtual worlds are now common in kids' play, having been popularized by Web-game sites such as Webkinz and Club Penguin.
Karen Fowler, the show's executive producer, calls the jump from television program to virtual Web game a "natural progression" for Sesame Workshop to make in trying to create educational programs for a generation of "digital natives."
"Kids are growing up in a media world that is incredibly available and fluid," Fowler said.
There are some, however, who question whether this new cross-platform strategy of trying to bring kids from the TV to the computer and back again is the proper role for PBS, long considered by parents as a trusted source of educational programming.
"This is really playing with dynamite," said Robert Kesten, president of the Screen-Time Institute of AFTAB, formerly known as America's Future Through Academic Progress.
Kesten is one of the promoters of Screen-Free Week, an annual event every April aimed at convincing families to unplug TVs and other media for a full week so they rediscover the joys of non-electronic entertainment.
Besides having qualms about a program that encourages kids to go from one sedentary activity — watching TV — to another — sitting in front of a computer, Kesten said he's disturbed by the creation of a virtual "Electric Company" that he fears kids could become too immersed in.
"The thing we really don't know is what the long-term impact is," Kesten said. "For a child it's much more difficult to distinguish programs from commercials and to draw lines between what's real and what isn't real."
Kesten criticizes the move as a means for the network to hold onto its share of the child audience in the face of growing competition.
The non-profit foundation was not primarily motivated by the desire to hold onto viewers and certainly supports the goal of making sure kids don't spend too much of their days on the couch, Fowler said. But its research has found that these new technologies can serve as a "new portal for education" — one that is more interactive than passively watching TV, she said.
A 2009 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children between 8 and 18 were using entertainment media an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes per day — a total that sounded a lot of alarm bells, particularly in light of the nation's obesity crisis. But one of the co-authors of the study — Professor Donald Roberts, professor emeritus in the department of communication at Stanford University — said it makes more sense to focus on improving content and on coaching parents to set limits than it does to hope that kids' appetite for new types of entertainment media will somehow decrease.
"I have to applaud 'Electric Company' for saying, 'OK, the technology is here. How do I put it to good use?' "
