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6/25/2010 12:29:55 PM
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The Editors
Posts 11
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There's no better way to get kids excited about learning than by throwing them a mystery that they need to solve—as demonstrated by the popularity of a couple of great PBS shows from the 1990s: Ghostwriter, in which a diverse group of New York City middle-schoolers solved crimes with the help of the eponymous ghost who could only communicate in text, teaching reading and writing skills; and the long-running game show Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? , in which a gang of thieves absconded with the world's landmarks, teaching history and geography.
Are you aware of any educational mystery programming today that compares to those inspiring shows? What are your favorite educational mysteries, past and present?
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6/25/2010 1:09:07 PM
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stanbrown
Posts 16
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As a senior in college in 1992, I completed a student-teaching internship my spring semester. Every day, the high school let out at 2:30, I was back in my dorm around 3:00 or 3:30, and turned on PBS to watch MathNet--was that part of 3-2-1 Contact!--which was a parody of Dragnet using math skills or just logical problem solving to solve mysteries. It was a lot of fun. I think Ghostwriter came a little later? Or maybe it was on at the same time--anyway, I watched and enjoyed it, too.
I can't remember any similar educational mysteries from when I actually was in elementary school, but at that time mysteries were a big part of my reading: Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, The Three Investigators, Trixie Belden, and sort-of-like mysteries The Mad Scientists Club and Tom Swift. They weren't didactic educational products, but they certainly kept me reading and learning vocabulary and so forth.
A current program I hope will really take off is Unnatural History on Cartoon Network--but it's a live-action show, airing Saturday and Sunday nights. It's basically a mish-mash of Harry Potter and Hogwarts and National Treasure and a little bit of Indiana Jones and sort of the Hardy Boys--but it is really, really good. There is a central trio who are a lot like Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley--the central character is even named Henry! But he is an American teenager who has been raised around the world by avant-garde naturalist parents--so he knows all about Tibetan Buddhism and martial arts and natural history. He's like a young Doc Savage. But he is getting too much for his rootless parents to handle, so they send him back to the US to his uncle, who is the headmaster of a boarding school that is connected to the "National Museum" in Washington, DC. They don't come right out and say "Smithsonian," but the gate to the school says "James Smithson High School." Henry, the main character, is wise about the natural world, but he is very naive and out of it when it comes to American teenaged popular culture. His first cousin, Jasper, is at first exasperated by him but becomes his partner in adventures. And then there is the girl who is at first an intellectual rival to Henry and who Jasper has a crush on. But the plots deal with history and science using the resources of the museum collections. The pilot had Henry figuring out the murder of his godfather and finding a lost treasure.
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6/25/2010 3:32:03 PM
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Tog
Posts 146
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"3-2-1 Contact" also had another group called "The Bloodhound Gang" (not to be confused with the current militant nerd rap/rock group). This was three kids of abut high school age that had a detective agency. IN part of one case, they were trapped in a moving truck when one noticed a small hole in the side. He found a large, white bit of cardboard and demonstrated a camera obscura. In another of their cases, I learned about moth pheromones. They were used to create a ghost hoax.
I don't remember "Mathnet" as being part of Contact, but it may have replaced Bloodhound Gang in in later years.
I still have some of my Encyclopedia Brown books, and I fund the Three Investigators just before the end of the 6th grade. The last year in that school. The Jr, High didn't have any of the books. Last year, one of the kid's channels had a Three Investigators movie that seemed to hold pretty close to what I remembered from 25+ years ago.
As a really little kid, I used to watch Scooby-Doo with a notebook so I could try to solve it first. There were a few stories from there that gave me ideas that I've used in my own stories since. Captain Caveman was another mystery based cartoon from the late 70's that had two ideas that still hold up as being clever, but would be too hard to disguise if I stole them.
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