Day 2 Thoughts

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Description: MIT 20.219 Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show, IAP 2015. View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/20-219IAP15.

Instructor: Nathan Hernandez

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

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SPEAKER: All right. So day two-- yeah, a lot happened today. So we had the sixth graders come in and critique our ideas. And I'd say the main thing that came out of that was I realized a lot about what I wanted to do. Kind of the moment that you said, you're going to have to tell your ideas to sixth graders, I had this dread because I knew my main idea just wasn't somewhere that was going to be of any interest to them.

And talking to them, it wasn't just at all. There was nothing that interested them at all. And I know it's part of the issue of framing and the issue's so big. And I didn't have a narrative that made it better and this contrasts one of my backup ideas. The nuggets was something I did this past semester on how to find magma chambers underground, which is really cool and yeah-- but honestly wasn't what I wanted to do a video on.

And so I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing yet but I think I'm going to stick with the decomposition of food. I'm going to make it-- I think that it has a lot of potential, especially once you get to the visual aspect because there are a lot of people who look at these videos of McDonald's decomposing or I think-- there's just a lot of really high-quality film time lapses of things decomposing on YouTube but there's not an explanation or anything. And I think that's why there's room for it. And if I really work on how to do it, I think I can make a good video out of decomposition and rotting.

But it definitely caught me off guard when they said we're going to have to talk to sixth graders because that really just made me realize that it's very important what we want to do here to make something. And that something-- it's going to be geared to a very different audience than myself. I would be probably OK watching an educational video about all of the ways decomposition and the specifics but I guess that's not for everyone in the most basic sense. So you have to pitch it in a way and I'll have figure out how to do that.

So yeah, that was today. I thought that Natalie's Intelius talk was actually really interesting because like you said, she talked about a lot of the mistakes she made and I can see how some of those might come up for me. And aside from the fact that Parabola just seems like something awesome that actually one of my teachers are in touch with still and they're probably forwarding along to him because he's always looking for cool things to do in the class. But yeah, all in all, a pretty good day-- lots of work to do on my script since I have no script.

So yeah, bye.

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