Podcasts and picture books: Kath Rothschild's PWR 91KA "Science Storytelling for Kids."
Children, one might argue, are scientists by nature. From Lego blocks to collecting rocks, children are world explorers. It is this natural fascination with life that our colleague, Dr. Kath Rothschild, used as the foundation for her spring 2025 course, PWR 91KA “Science Storytelling for Kids: Sharing Science with Younger Audiences”. In this wonderful new advanced elective, this natural curiosity was nourished by our undergrads’ multifaceted creativity.
In the class, Kath guided the students through a series of projects: after choosing a topic, students wrote brief origin stories explaining how they became enamoured with their subject matter; they then created a podcast, afterward moving on to engage more visual elements of storytelling, creating a YouTube-style info-video or a picture-book on their topic – all geared at a young audience (hence the title of the course). By the end of the quarter, each student had generated a portfolio of reflective and creative work.
Animals, unsurprisingly, prove to be popular topics for student projects in the class. As Kath notes,
“Two students created podcasts about marine animals; one was called Toothy Tales, the story of a misunderstood shark on the first day of kindergarten, while the other engaged and a tween audience in the story of hermit crabs’ role in aiding the kelp forests by comparing the behavior to running their own crab kelp-trimming salon.”
One especially popular character invented in the class was Clukey the chicken, who was featured on a podcast as he learned that he is descended from dinosaurs! Clukey proved so popular that he became a multi-platform celebrity, earning his own picture-book.
Students explored subjects involving life-forms both microscopic and brobdingnagian – “everything from the difference between a virus and bacteria to the complicated system of life that is the Redwood forest,” Kath shares. Across the quarter, they used their topics to explore deeper cultural and social issues; for instance, the student who worked on the Redwood story used it as an opportunity to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), the deep knowledge about the environment accumulated over countless generations by indigenous peoples. In this way, the PWR 91KA students created projects that offered their young audience a learning experience not limited to stand-off “objective” science, but also including consideration of the way people connect with the life around them, and the meaning it can have in their lives.
A series of guests enriched the class experience. Inspired by guest speaker Hollie Collins (Fortkamp), SIS Academic Technology Specialist, who led the class through the live recording and editing of a podcast, students enhanced both their technical and creative skills as they worked on these projects. Our former colleague Laura Joyce Davis helped them learn additional podcasting skills by teaching them to work with Descript, a video and audio editing app. Guest Dr. Sascha Skuchek shared a technique called “sketch noting”— a process for engaging with the “power of drawing as if no-one is watching”, and students had a chance to work with Jennifer Bertman, the New York Times best-selling author of the Book Scavenger series and A Good Deed Can Grow. In addition, students themselves shared tips and hacks on using Canva for visual designs. Creativity bloomed throughout, with improv activities and students creating original water color art for picture books and original piano compositions for podcasts.
But perhaps one of the most memorable aspects of the class for the PWR students was the opportunity to receive feedback directly from their intended audience: fifth-graders at Crocker Highlands Elementary School. These young students got to listen to some of the podcasts created in the class and offered their opinions, an experience that proved to be a high point for the PWR students. At the end of the quarter, one of the PWR 91KA student reflected, “This really is such a beautiful and unique course. I went from thinking about teaching as a far off dream to realizing that teaching is really attainable in so many more ways than being in a classroom.” In designing this course, Kath embraced the spirit of our science communication tract, inviting her STEM students to reimagine traditional modes of sharing specialized information with a focus on audience, on genre, and on expanding their own sense of their identity as science writers.
