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For teachers looking to inject some excitement into their geography lesson, Skype might be the answer. Silvia Tolisano recently created a game she calls “Mystery Skype Call” that uses the video conferencing tool and some critical thinking to teach students geography in a new and exciting way.

Read more and see a video on the Spark blog…

Story Boxes are popping up all over town—in museums, libraries, and schools. To date, about 130 Story Box units have been produced, and that’s just the beginning. So what exactly are Story Boxes, and what do they mean for children in Pittsburgh?

A Story Box is a 21” x 12” x 4” portable device containing images with “hot spots” that, when pressed, play related audio clips. For example, the “My Favorite Animal” Story Box features photographs of young children with illustrated embellishments to make them look like different animals. By pressing on a child’s photo, the listener can hear audio clips of that child roaring like a tiger, describing a zebra’s fur, or remembering the time they met a unicorn on the beach.

Each Story Box focuses on a specific theme. Story Boxes produced to date have included topics such as:

• What I Am Thankful For
• Unique Things I Know How To Do
• My Favorite Animal
• Bullying
• Martin Luther King
• Personal Narratives
• Impact Of The Arts
• Hope For The Coming Year
• Environmental Documentaries
• Career Profiles

The devices are funded by Spark and produced by The Saturday Light Brigade. The Saturday Light Brigade (SLB for short) began in 1978 as a weekly public radio program focusing on family and community life. Today, SLB has grown into a non-profit with a permanent home in The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. In addition to broadcasting live for six hours every Saturday, SLB also offers technical and self-expression workshops for children and youth from 8 to 18 years of age.

In 2008, SLB began working with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon on a project called HearMe. HearMe and Story Boxes have a lot in common as they both focus on collecting and distributing children’s stories. In many ways, these projects take the original intent of the SLB radio show and mobilize it. Host and Founder Larry Berger explains:

“When SLB began in 1978, it was reasonable for us to use radio to inform and delight an often-unexpecting audience with children’s stories and ideas.  We designed Story Box technology with hopes of achieving this goal in today’s fragmented media environment and fast-paced world.  As mass media shrinks and user-directed content increases, we wanted a simple way to reach people and, frankly, tempt them to listen to voices of children.”

Read more on the Spark blog…

Hear Me, a project of CMU’s CREATE Lab, strives to make the voices of children heard. This summer, they have chosen a larger-than-life medium that they hope will give children one more way to communicate: billboards. So far, 50 billboards have been erected in Allegheny County and the surrounding region. The topics discussed cover everything from cyber-bullying and neighborhood violence to concerns over the environment. One billboard reads, “I still get called names… —- Crystal, 16.” Another reads, “I was scared when I first heard the gunshot… — Sherdina, 12.” The billboards include links that viewers can follow to the Hear Me website where they’ll find audio stories from more than 3,000 students in 25 school districts.

“We assume that children today have plenty of opportunities to make their dreams, fears and hopes known, whether it’s by a mobile phone, computer or just talking,” said Heide Waldbaum, director of Hear Me, “But learning how to express themselves about things that they really care about — and getting adults and people in authority to really listen to them — is difficult for many young people.”

Read more on the Spark blog…

It’s no secret that state and local budget cuts have been putting pressure on education. A recently published New York Times article discusses one of the many outcomes of this pressure– decreased class time. It seems many institutions are dealing with a smaller budget by creating a shorter school day. “Thousands of school districts across the nation are gutting summer-school programs, cramming classes into four-day weeks or lopping days off the school year.”

This is a surprising development considering our current administration’s stance on education reform. At his 2009 confirmation hearing, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared,

“Our school day is too short, our school week is too short, our school year is too short.”

This view is based on several factors, among them our desire to compete with more education-savvy nations who enforce much longer school days. Many educators will also agree that over the summer months, many students forget what they’ve learned and need to be re-instructed come fall.

Read the rest of the story on the Spark blog…

Open the door to 5405 Broad Street and you’ll feel a lot like you’ve wandered into Pee Wee’s Play House. That is of course if you replace all of the talking furniture with pieces of ongoing projects—lighting rigs, puppetry, video props, and art installations to name a few. Dave English actually made the comparison himself when I visited his home and studio space, The Schmutz Lodge, on June 26, 2011. In a way it’s the perfect vehicle for explaining what Dave English and Don Orkoskey do: create a space where creativity, education, and innovation collide. The Schmutz Lodge is nestled into a line of mill-era row houses a block away from the Penn Avenue Arts District in Garfield. It serves as home base for The Schmutz Company—a collaborative arts organization that does everything from teaching children animation to performing live puppet shows. It’s hard to believe that when the Schmutz duo first met they were working as mortgage processors. Luckily cubicles are notoriously ineffective structures for containing artists. Don and Dave broke free and decided instead to focus on their respective crafts of photography and puppetry. A few years after their escape, they found themselves at Dave’s place constructing creatures from wire, wine corks, and other flotsam of which they then took a sequence of photos. This was the first day of animation for the Schmutz Company. Since then, The Schmutz Company has taken on many projects, including Papermation. Made possible through a partnership with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Spark-funded Papermation teaches children (and adults) how to create animations using stop-motion photography. When asked if they were ever surprised by the children’s abilities or the type of work they created, Dave replied,

“Surprised might not be the right word but impressed definitely. Of course we’ve worked with kids who are skilled beyond their years as fine artists, as storytellers, or as group leaders but we’ve come to expect profound content. Kids have an uninhibited threshold for creativity that many adults lose once they start paying taxes. If somebody surprised us it would have been a Russian three year old who told the story of a rocket kissing a fish. Or maybe the girl who turned a charcoal animation into a statement on eminent domain.”

Papermation workshops have been hosted by the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the Warhol Museum, the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and various other venues throughout the region. The nomadic ability of the project allows for a much wider audience than do static installations. Don pointed out that although Pittsburgh residents may live within driving distance of cultural districts and events, they don’t always view these resources as accessible. Projects like Papermation aim to change that, and in doing so to provide a valuable learning opportunity to area children.

“We want them to retain three main lessons. We want them to appreciate the sense of teamwork that comes from working on a group project with people who they may not know or who may be very different from them. We want them to recognize the simplicity of the process we use to make our animations. We want them to learn how to tell collaborative improvisational stories.”

In addition to their work on Papermation, the Schmutz duo is also at work establishing a new artist residency. Located right next door to the Schmutz Lounge, come July 1st, the Garfield Bridge will be inhabited by its founding resident artists painter/educator Paul O’Brien and musician/singer Autumn Ayers. The Schmutz team describe their vision of the residency:

“The residency will house two artists of different disciplines whose coexistence and cross-pollination will shape the work they produce. The residency’s goal is to put artists in the role of well-supported community organizer supporting cultural growth and community interaction that will be relevant to the neighbors. (…)The work they create will overlap their artistic goals with the interests of the existing residents. The first few months of work will focus on improving the property at 5407 Broad, developing interpersonal connections in the neighborhood, fundraising, and grant proposals.”

They plan to host an opening event in the fall of 2011. Talk to Dave and Don long enough and you’ll hear one word again and again—community. The two are clearly invested in the region and in using their projects as tools for strengthening communal connections and making Pittsburgh a better place. The Schmutz Lodge is a perfect example of the transformative power of art and this metamorphosis doesn’t end on Broad Street. Thanks to Papermation and the work being done by the Schmutz company, artistic innovation is alive and well in Pittsburgh. Photography by Jessica Pachuta. See more photos from The Schmutz Lodge. For more information visit The Schmutz Company website.

Check out the interesting talk Mark Frauenfelder gave at TEDxKids in Brussels a few weeks ago.


Mark Frauenfelder is the Editor in Chief for Make magazine, a publication that uses technology to create do-it-yourself projects. As Mark explains in his talk, this same emphasis on design can augment the educational experience of children when used as a teaching tool. In Mark’s words,

“The problem with a lot of today’s schools is that they train kids to be scholars. They’re always preparing kids. Kids are learning how to research things through books and the internet. They’re writing reports about what they learned. They’re learning math as abstract concepts, not through practical knowledge. So kids are always preparing to do things but they’re not actually doing anything.”

The solution to this problem? To teach a curriculum focused on design and hands-on projects rather than abstract concepts.

read more…