UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A longtime partnership between the Penn State Eberly College of Science’s Office of Science Outreach and WPSU has resulted in a public television special that will be distributed to PBS member stations nationwide following its premiere at 7 p.m. Dec. 26 on local member station WPSU.
Showcasing educational science activities developed for Penn State’s popular Science-U summer camps for K-12 students, the special presents those projects to children and their parents or caregivers in an at-home environment.
“We've talked about putting this together for a long time, and it just made sense during COVID to finally do that,” said Kristian Berg, the series’ producer at WPSU. “Suddenly families and kids were locked down, remote learning, and we have all these different experiments from the Science-U camps that we've captured on video over the years. So we said wouldn't it be cool to unite them all in a program!”
An extensive collaboration between Science-U camp instructors, Penn State instructional designers, and WPSU’s education team, the special was created around a theme of providing parents and caregivers the resources to learn about science together at home, and it also provides valuable science-backed advice to parents on how to get the most out of the activities, “things like asking open-ended questions, encouraging boys and girls equally, turning mistakes and failures into positive learning experiences — all based on studies that have been done on positive adult-child interactions that have been proven to engage children in scientific discovery,” Berg explained. “At a time when children had no choice but to learn from home, we decided to draw upon our sizeable collection of live action and animated short videos to build an entertaining and informative special to inspire kids and parents to explore the world of science together.”