Inside PBS Blog

The next President will be seeking a lot of advice in his first 100 days. One constituency he may not be planning to consult?  Kids.

Enter PBS KIDS and the National Black Programming Consortium's New Media Institute (NMI), who are joining together to ask kids ages 6-11 what they'd like to tell the next president. Their goal is to educate children on the importance of civic engagement by getting them to think about how issues effect them personally.

To keep the project focused, the producers will specifically invite kids to share their thoughts on three issues that were frequently on kids' minds in preliminary interviews:  the environment, education and health.  The project, with the working title Speak Out!, will launch on PBSKIDS.org on November 5th.

The Speak Out! Web site will include a variety of interactive and educational features based on the issues of education, health and the environment, including videos of kids talking about how they'd like to see the next President respond to these issues. In addition, kids are then encouraged to submit their own ideas, and vote on the ideas other kids have submitted.

The most popular ideas appear at the bottom of the page in the form of a letter.  Other options for the final product are still in consideration by NBPC.

Over the next few weeks, Engage will run a series of blog posts that follow the project from idea to implementation.

I had a chance to sit in on a meeting this morning in which members of the NMI and PBS KIDS teams were discussing the initial Speak Out! designs and how kids will relate to the content.  Here are the early designs for an issue page about the environment:

Initial changes will include making the educational content (seen as clickable buttons on the lower right) more prominent.  Additionally, the site will feature more interviews from children to illustrate more specific ideas about the issues.

The "speaker people" will represent the voice of all children and will wear accessories to indicate the individual issue pages (sweatbands for the health page, gardening tools for the environment).  In this illustration, the speaker people wear Converse sneakers - a style that many in the meeting thought looked like "boy feet."  The next iteration will have speaker people with footwear representative of both boys and girls!

What would you add to the design?  Are you interested in what kids want to tell the next President? Are you interested in how a website like this goes from idea to implementation?

Also, let us know what issues are important to the kids in your life.  If you're a parent, do you talk to your kids about the news?

In the coming posts, we will continue to explore the design of the site and share updates on the progress of the project.  Stay tuned.

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