CPB bets millions on projects to teach teens history, civics

Originally published in Current, July 9, 2007
By Jeremy Egner

CPB is spending millions to fund reality TV shows, video games, competitions and other interactive teaching tools designed to help middle- and high-school students investigate America's past, interact with founders of the republic and follow a bill's path to enactment through Capitol Hill's sausage factory.

The corporation last week announced the first seven grantees of its American History and Civics Initiative. The $20 million project, launched in 2005, aims to create educational projects that somehow reach the iPod-equipped, PlayStation-addicted inheritors of American democracy.

"We're going to go get 'em where they are," says Greg Diefenbach, CPB senior v.p. for TV programming. "And where they are is on all these different platforms."

Kids have historically abandoned public TV once they outgrow its children's shows and the system has never courted the teen audience with much success. But CPB decided it should try again based on "a deck of data," Diefenbach says. The objective: improving older students' history and civics knowledge, which is spotty at best.

In addition, the pricey project will help the system by fueling experiments involving alternate platforms, Diefenbach says.

This first group of grants, which range from $400,000 to $900,000 each — specific figures weren't available — will fund research, development and prototyping for seven multiplatform projects. As prototypes emerge, CPB will weed out weaker proposals and fund production of two, three or four projects about a year from now. Most are planned to go public in 2009. CPB may still seed R&D and prototypes for a few more concepts, Diefenbach says.

The seven groups whose proposals entered the semifinals last week typically include public TV stations that partner with educational nonprofits, commercial videogame developers and content companies.

The partners can divide responsibilities however they want, Diefenbach says, but he advises pubcasters to tap into existing relationships with local educators. Each group will be required to hire a research firm to test its product's effectiveness as a teaching tool.

The corporation will also favor projects that can sustain themselves financially, such as educational games that can charge fees for usage. Revenue guidelines are still being finalized, Diefenbach says.

All of the projects are required to include a TV component, though it remains to be seen how many of the resulting productions will appear on PBS or PBS.org, Diefenbach says. The network has been involved in planning, but relevant execs weren't available for comment at Current's deadline.

CPB hired Boston's WGBH to oversee the initiative. Its interactive department will shepherd the various projects through the prototyping phase, managing schedules and budgets, offering problem-solving help as needed, and evaluating educational effectiveness, says Ron LaRussa, director of WGBH Interactive. For broadcasts, WGBH will also manage stations relations and promotion.

Like America at a Crossroads, which received a mostly favorable reception when it finally debuted this spring (Current, April 23), the American History and Civics Initiative emerged during CPB's stormy Kenneth Tomlinson period.
Critics wondered at the time if the corporation aimed to fund patriotic propaganda. PubTV programmers were more concerned about the millions diverted, in their view, from bolstering the primetime schedule. Two years later, that stance hasn't changed for some.

"I'm even more convinced that trying to reach an audience that we have tried time and time again to reach — and failed time and again to reach — is a waste of money," Garry Denny, director of programming for Wisconsin Public Television, said last week. Denny outlined the Public Television Programmers Association concerns about the civics initiative in a May 2005 Current commentary when he was the group's board president.

While he acknowledges the value of experimenting with alternative platforms, Denny says he thinks the money would be better spent on the primetime schedule. However, CPB's Diefenbach notes, the corporation is already "plowing a lot of money" into the public TV schedule.

The state of student history and civics education is such that CPB thinks "it's worth the risk and effort to use public broadcasting's assets to make a positive impact in an area where it's badly needed," he says.

CPB received 88 proposals, including pitches from more than 40 public TV stations.
The first projects to get R&D funds are:

• Young American Heroes, a multiplatform project designed to teach American history to middle school students through stories about kids doing extraordinary things at seminal historical moments. Partners: Connecticut Public Television, Connecticut-based Docere Palace Studios, New York's Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and EDSITEment, a web portal offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
• Virtual Congress, a Web-based game simulating the adoption of a bill. Partners: Indiana University's WTIU in Bloomington with the university's Center on Congress;, There.com, an online virtual world created by Silicon Valley firm Makena Technologies; and the Washington-based Close Up Foundation.
• Flashback, a multiplatform reality TV show and online game in which high school students race to complete curriculum-based missions throughout the country. Partners: OPB, San Francisco's Floating World Media, the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University, Intersection Productions and the Bay Area Video Coalition.
• Young History Detectives, a spinoff of the popular primetime series in which teens will investigate artifacts that may have played significant roles in U.S. history. Partners: OPB, Lion TV, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, Magic Lantern Productions and others.
• Mission America, a website centering an adventure videogame featuring 10 events ("missions") in American history.  Partners: New York's WNET, New York-based interactive design studio Electric Funstuff, Oxford University Press, American Social History Project at City University of New York, the New York City Department of Education and the National Council on Social Studies.
• American Dynasties, a multiplayer role-playing online game, casts students as characters who interact with significant U.S. historical figures. Partners: Penn State's WPSU in University Park, Pa., Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker's Center for New American Media in New York, Rapid Reality Games in Atlanta, virtual world creator Kaneva Inc., also in Atlanta.
• Liberty Under the Law, a multiplatform program designed to help students understand the contemporary relevance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Partners: Los Angeles' KCET, the Center for Civic Education in Los Angeles, videogame company Activision Inc., the University of Southern California Game Innovation Lab, the National Center for Teaching History in Schools.

Web page posted July 9, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee

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