The Electric Company: About the Site

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Hey, parents! We're excited to introduce you to The Electric Company website on PBS KIDS and its exciting features. The site brings the vibrancy of the show to an interactive environment and is geared toward users of all reading levels. Here's a quick look:

Electric Company Videos

The streaming video player offers full episodes, show clips, and music videos, as well as web-exclusive interviews, bloopers, and behind-the-scenes pieces. Kids can save their favorite videos to their profile.

Smashups

With the Video SmashUp, children preview, select, and assemble clips from the show to mix with stickers, text cards, transitions, and music to make their very own video creations. The SmashUp reinforces the theme-based vocabulary of the show, by helping kids build stories of their own using vocabulary stickers and text screens. These creations appear in their profile and in a user gallery, where others can rate the videos, send to a friend, or remix them into new video creations.

The Electric Company site features eleven games, which focus largely on phonetic goals and strategies for reading. Many of the games incorporate video, music, animations and characters from the show.

What's the Story allows players to tell their own story by making their very own Electric Company fairytale, commercial, or news report! Players select who, what, where, when, why, and how of the story and then watch it play back as a narrated video.

Manny's Word Mangler is a action packed game that focuses on developing word building skills by emphasizing word chunking. Players grab pieces from words that Manny has discarded to piece them back into real words. The game is broken into a series of 3 timed rounds which progress from slow to fast and players must build as many words as they can.

The Next Electric Company Star is a fun-filled game that teaches follow through as animated characters "audition" for the players. The players must select the character that follows through and reads the word or sentence correctly. Each round presents a different word or sentence on a cue card,
and a different winner.

Shock's Beatbox is an interactive learning tool that allows kids to make their own beatbox tracks! This game is a free-form self-expression game that covers most aspects of the show's phonics curriculum. While creating their own beatbox, they will learn about the sounds that different letter combinations make. Players can then save completed tracks to their profile.

Word Transformer is a fun, musical game that teaches kids how to use the letters R, H, and "silent" E to transform words. This game will also teach kids how these transformer letters change the vowel sounds in words.

Great Escapes teaches players how to organize a group of words into a grammatically correct sentence. Players will see an incomplete sentence and an assortment of words, and will have to place the words in their correct positions in the sentence before the timer runs out.

Combotronicteaches players to build words by combining word parts from a given pool of word parts (syllables or parts of compound words). Players are challenged to make as many words as possible with each set of word parts.

Chain Game teaches users how to replace a sound in one word to make another word, and continue to do this until they have a sequence or chain of five words. For example, a user must change one letter or letter combination at a time to create the following chain of words: fast > mast > map > mop > stop > step.

User Profiles ("My Profile")

Kids can create their own profiles on the site � a great opportunity for self-expression! (Moderated by Sesame Workshop staff, of course.) Users can choose a graphical background and a user icon for their page, and can display their favorite clips from the site's video section. In the section of their profile called "My Creations," they can post audio clips created in Shock's beatbox game. Users also can decorate their profiles with "zaps," which are animated images or "stickers" that are hidden throughout the site.

A user's page is visible to anyone registered on the site.

Character Profiles

Twelve of the show's characters also have their own profiles. Learn more about each character with a biographical slideshow. These profiles also contain show clips and printable activity sheets featuring each character. All of the characters' total point tallies live on their profile pages.

The Electric Challenge is an ongoing competition that allows users to earn points from the games that they play (Chain Game, Combotronic, etc.), and apply them to their own user profiles and to their favorite character's profile. When a user gains a certain number of points, she will earn "zaps "or backgrounds for her profile page.

The points that all site users earn for a specific character will be added to that character's page.

The Battle page shows how each of the twelve characters are doing on the Leader board. It also includes a Hall of Fame with videos of the characters who have earned the most points in the past month and previous months.

Zaps are interactive vocabulary "stickers" found in the site-wide scavenger hunt. Each zap found by the user is saved to their profile page and can be used to decorate and give their profile page a personal flair.