Here is the Text Content and Summaries of the Children's Series I have done for TV For Sample Videos Go to my Video Page
WiseWeatherWhys
WiseWeatherWhys - 65 x 2 minutes
Fast paced, exciting and stimulating, these 2 minute factoids answer the gazillion questions that kids have about every thing concerning the weather. Each WiseWeatherWhys factoid is a weather mini-adventure, jumping headlong into the myriad of weather connections and facts that makes weather fun and fascinating, peaking the interest with activities, animation and actual weather, making even a rainy day a fun day. WiseWeatherWhys places the child’s entertainment first and foremost, understanding that true learning comes from interest and engagement, that is, being entertained, from participating and doing. Each two-minute broadcast fact also features a multimedia web site to provide questions and answers and activities related to each topic covered by the individual episode, expanding the original broadcast into a new media adventure. Parents, teachers and children will love the holistic and active approach the 65 factoids provide, making the weather part of every child’s life. WiseWeatherWhys Show Outlines 1. Jet Stream; It’s 10 miles up, circles the globe at 300 miles per hour and can blow a 747 around like a toy. It’s the fastest moving air on the planet! 2. Storm Clouds: Clouds are weather signposts and give forecasters clues about what is happening in the weather. Being able to pick out the regular clouds from the storm clouds can save your life! 3. Heavy Rain ; Floods! Mudslides! Endless rain! Some parts of Canada get 5 feet of rain a year! Making rain is just like a cooking recipe. Add water vapour, dust and cool slowly and watch the air sweat it out! 4. Buried in Snow: Imagine 10 feet of snow in one day! It happens. And it is built one flake at a time! Six sided perfection. Each and every snowflake is a crystal and different from every other snowflake, but they all add up if y 5. Fog: It’s just a cloud close to the ground and made up of water. Just try driving a car or landing an airplane in fog. It can be deadly! In the city when it is mixed with pollution we call it smog. It can bury a city for weeks on end and be deadly to breathe. 6. Hurricanes: Some of the biggest hurricanes are the nastiest storms on Earth. They can have winds of 300 km/hr and drop 20 centimetres of rain a day. They are so bad we even have names for them. 7. Lightning: A million gazillion volts of electricity that can power a city! Lightning strikes start forest fires and can even travel from the ground to the clouds. 8. Thunder: By listening to thunder you can tell how far away the storm is. And what’s more thunder can help you protect yourself from lightning, which is very dangerous. 9. Wind: Wind can be a friend or it can be dangerous. Wind is what happens when air moves. If it is gentle it can power a sailboat or a windmill. When it is strong it can topple a building. 10. Tornadoes: It looks like a weather snake; dancing to mystical music, stretch from clouds to ground. But a tornado is a wind that everyone should fear. 11. The Ionosphere: Look up, way up. Its one million degrees and 150 miles up, almost outer space. It stops super fast particles from the sun from destroying all life on earth. It’s a shield worth having! 12. ETs. : No, not aliens, just the worst storms you can imagine on the oceans. Its what happens when a hurricane meets the north! 13. The Power of Ice: It can crack any cement, break any rock and bring down mountains. Its called Ice. Ice covers the north and south poles and falls from the sky during thunderstorms. Ice is what happens when water gets too cold. 14. Hail: Imagine a thunderstorm with wind and rain and ice! Its called hail and be the size of baseballs! It can flatten a city. 15. Deserts: Take away water and you have a desert. You can hot deserts like the Sahara and cold deserts like the Antarctic. There is no weather if you don’t have water, and it’s why Egyptian mummies last so long. And Canada has one of the biggest in the world! 16. Tropics: The equator is a place where the warmth of the sun always keeps things hot. This is called tropical. If it’s wet you get a rainforest, if it’s dry a desert. It’s where you get the worst weather in the world too! 17. Lightning Strikes Safety: 10,000 times a second and who says it can’t strike the same place twice! Where is the safest place to be when there is lightning around? Should you talk on the phone. What happens when you are struck by lightning? 18. Ice Ages: Just 10,000 years ago the weather across the Earth was much different than it is today. Huge sheets of ice covered much of Canada and Europe and made the world much cooler than it is today. Everything was frozen solid 365 days a year! 19. Weather on the Sun: Yes the sun has weather too. Gigantic storms bigger than the entire Earth! These are storms that send particles hurtling through outer space and that can knock out a power grid! 20. The Longest Storm: It called Jupiter’s red dot. It is the largest, most vicious storm in the solar system and has been going on for 300 years! It has winds faster than sound and is bigger than 3 earths side by side! 21. Northern Lights: All you need is a magnetosphere and a sun. Its what happens when outer space and our magnetosphere collide. On a clear night you can even hear them! 22. Rainbows: Six beautiful colours made out of droplets of water. You can only see them early or late in the day and only away from the sun. It’s a perfect paint box and you can have as many as you want, just not at noon. 23. Oxygen: Why is the sky blue? Now that is a question that has just everybody stumped. If it weren’t for the oxygen that you breathe the sky would be yellow or red. And if I wasn’t good for you it would kill you! 24. The Greenhouse Effect: Its what keeps you warm and toasty. Its like a blanket that holds the sun’s warmth close to the Earth and gives us weather. But like anything, too much is not good, and we could kill our planet with too much of a good thing! 25. Weather on Other Worlds: Believe it or not, we are not the only planet that has weather. On Mars it is too cold. On Venus it is too hot and has sulphuric acid. Ours is like Goldilock’s, not too hot, not too cold. 26. Mirages: This happens when the weather plays tricks with light. You can see cities, oceans and many, many other things that just aren’t there. They are called mirages. 27. Waves: The biggest waves are found off the coast of Newfoundland and can be over 100 feet high with enough energy to sink the largest vessels on Earth! 28. Vostok, Antarctica: The coldest place on Earth. The temperature –82C! Cold enough to freeze you solid in 5 minutes! 29. Vostok Lake: A Lake that has been trapped in a glacier for 3 million years, 4 kilometres under the Antarctic ice. 30. Addis Ababa: The hottest place on earth with temperatures that can reach 60C!!!! Talk about sweat. 31. Cyclones and Typhoons: The biggest, baddest storms on Earth found in the Pacific tropics. The have the heaviest rainfall, largest size and winds stronger than a hurricane. 32. Water Spouts: They are like tornadoes only over the water. They happen in the late fall when the air is cold and the lake waters are warm. And they are dangerous! 33. Torricelli: This is the guy who knows all about working under pressure and was almost burned at the stake for it back in the 1500s! Talk about weather that can kill you! 34. Chaos and Weather: Weather can never be predicted perfectly, no matter how hard you try. A butterfly flapping in New York can actually, theoretically cause a typhoon in Japan two weeks later! 35. Ben Franklin: Definitely don’t do this at home. For a smart guy he was stupid! He tried to see if lightning was electric with a kite, a key and thunderstorm. More than 20 people have been killed doing this! 36. Absolute Zero: Some really, really strange stuff happens at absolute zero, the coldest that you can get and named after Lord Kelvin. Atoms stop moving and gases become solid! 37. Entropy: How is weather like a cup of hot chocolate? Stir in the milk and you will find out! Its all about disorder and unpredictability! 38. Brownian Motion: Even stuff that is frozen solid moves! It was discovered by Prof Brown and explained by Prof Einstein. It’s the strangest thing to look at ice through a microscope and see the atoms moving! 39. Super Computers: The fastest most powerful computers on Earth are used to predict the weather. Without them we wouldn’t have a hope of predicting the weather accurately. They can perform 35 trillion calculations a second and still take 4 hours to make a 12 hour forecast! 40. The Sound Barrier: When a plane breaks the sound barrier, it has to push the air shock wave ahead of it and that creates a sonic boom that can crack windows. Without the air, a plane could not fly and there would be not sonic boom! 41. Airplane Crashes: Weather causes more air crashes than anything else. Icing, wind, rain and snow all create conditions that pilots hate and try to avoid, though in the name of research the actually fly into the heart of the storms! 42. Drought: The driest place on Earth in the Chilean desert where it hasn’t rained in 300 years. 43. Inversions: They trap the bad air around cities and can happen anytime of year. The worst happened in London in 1954 when more than 2,000 people died because of an inversion and bad air. 44. Turbulence: Air and wind do not always travel in straight lines. They twist and curl and dip and doodle. You just can’t see it because air is invisible. But airplanes can feel it. Boy, can they ever! 45. Hypothermia: It is so cold you feel warm and toasty and stop shivering. And its really, really dangerous and can kill you. Each year people die of hypothermia caused by wind and water. 46. Heat Stroke: So hot you stop sweating. It’s a heat emergency! Get that core temperature down right now. Drink fluids and stay in the shade! 47. Day: Its 24 hours long and causes the weather and their patterns. Without day you could not have weather! What would happen if the Earth stopped rotating?! 48. Mt. Washington New Hampshire: It is the windiest place on the planet and has wind that have been recorded at 300 miles per hour and never less than 45! 49. Sailing: Without weather there could be no sailing and understanding how wind works is crucial to sailing. And a sailboat can mover faster than the wind blowing it! 50. Flying: Flying is easy! It’s all about sailing without the water! A little air and a way to move it and you’re off! 51. Chinook: Sounds almost like schnook, and in Calgary you are one if you don’t know what a Chinook is, schnook! 52. Weather Researchers: These are guys and gals who risk their lives to study the weather and fly into hurricanes, sail out on research ship and even go up in balloons to learn about the worst weather in the world!. 53. Glaciers: Now that’s ice and if the climate changed even in a tiny way, to become a little colder, you see one in a hurry! Glaciers are rivers of ice that can change the world’s climate! 54. Icebergs: When a glacier meets the ocean, you get an iceberg. The world champion iceberg capital is St John’s Nfld! An iceberg can sink a ship and gouge out a channel in the ocean bottom! 55. Floods: They are the biggest weather killers in the world. Floods kill more people than anything else! Whether its waves, rivers, rain or landslides, floods happen all around the world and can devastate a region for years. 56. Snow Belt: No it’s not around my waist. Its what happens when the cold air meets warm water and it happens in the winter. Boy do you get belted! 57. Freezing Rain: Mix cold weather, rain and just the right weather conditions and you get freezing rain. It can destroy forests, power lines and buildings. Just ask the people who live in Montreal! 58. Wing Icing: Try flying through a cloud and see what happens. Funny that birds don’t worry about it, but planes do. 59. Bernoulli Effect: Without is you could not sail, fly, or have barbecues! Its what happens when you put a twist in the wind and make it travel over rough land. 60. Water Vapour: Its what makes clouds disappear and reappear, rain, fog and all that other weather stuff. You can’t have weather without it. It’s like trying to bake a cake without an oven! 61.Slippery: Why do you slip on ice and not wood? Why can you skate on ice and not cement? Why is ice slippery and what can you do to make it safe! 62. Sublimation: Its called dry ice and it does something that regular ice doesn’t do. It disappears into thin air! 63. Freezing: Ever see a lake freeze? It’s a giant crystal! And it floats. Imagine what would happen if ice didn’t float! 64. Radiating: How do things get cold, hot and in between? How does the sun heat the Earth and the air. Its called radiating. 65. Condensation: How do you get water out of thin air. Its called condensation and it makes the weather go round and round and round.
The Adventures of the AfterMath Crew 26 x 30 minutes The story of mathematics is never ending. From Nothing to Infinity. Twenty-six half hour shows exploring times, characters and the significance of mathematics and its impact on our world, bringing together ideas, people and cultures, initiating the young viewer to a world they will never forget. AfterMath uses the latest in computer animation, 2-D and 3-D. We start each episode introducing a puzzle or question related to that particular show's theme followed by the content of the show (a math map!) through which the answer will be revealed.
AfterMath is a half hour children’s (aged 7-11) TV series about Mathematics
AfterMath is about the world around us seen through lens of Mathematics
AfterMath is about exploring all facets of the universe, from science to art to technology through Mathematics
AfterMath is a springboard into the education curriculum (grades 4, 5 and 6) using the most pervasive medium of our time, television
AfterMath looks at Mathematics through entertainment, activities, situations and comedy.
AfterMath combines animation, children, and stories in an exciting, entertaining, educational package
AfterMath is for children, about children and is ostensibly produced by children and also just happens to include some mathematics!
Show Overviews:
1) Zero: “Nothing is Easy” Zero is probably the most famous and the most important number in mathematics. And for many many years it was also the most ignored of all numbers. There was even a law against the use of zero. The idea of “zero” is far more than just “nothing”. Zero is a more than a number, it is a concept, a place holder and a very big part of the Renaissance of western civilization. Without zero not only would mathematics not be the same, but there would be no technology, computers or economy. In short, without zero the world would be a very different place.
2) Angles: “The Angle is Everything” Make a turn, construct a shape or draw two crossing lines. What do you find? Angles! They seem to be hidden in everything, in the most unlikely of places. Even the smoothest, roundest shape of them all, the circle, has an infinite number of angles hidden inside. And everyone uses them. It would be impossible to find your way around without angles, drive a car, build a house or make a painting. Get the point? Get the Angle!
3) Lines: “More than the Straight and Narrow” Get a point....now get another. Join the two. What do you have? A line. Looks simple and it is. But there is more to lines than meet the eye. Take railroad tracks. They never get together, running parallel, never closer never further apart. No matter how far they travel, they travel in pairs and always apart. Think of all the lines that you have in your life. There are telephone, curved, straight, narrow, spiral, lines to remember and even lines of reasoning.
4) Risk : “Taking a Chance” Roll the dice....buy a lottery ticket....spin the wheel....Take a Chance! Whether you’ve rolled a dice or not you are taking risks and chances every day. Even your existence is based on probability. When Albert Einstein introduced the world to the incredible universe of Quantum Mechanics he discovered that no matter what he did, the universe it described seemed solely to based on probability....chance! That idea was so repulsive to Albert that he stated, even though quantum mechanics was his creation, it had to be wrong because ”God didn’t play dice with the universe.” Neils Bohr, another great physicist and contemporary of Albert’s, had more faith in the theory and responded with “Don’t tell God what to do with his Universe”.
5) Infinity: “Its Forever” How far is the sky? How small is the smallest number? When does time end? Infinity is something that goes on forever without end. It is a strange concept because most of the things that we deal with in the real world and even mathematics seem to come to an end and don’t go on forever. When you add two numbers together you always get another number and the same goes for multiplication and subtraction. But something happens when you start to divide, especially when you divide by zero. Out pops something that is different from any number imaginable, because it's not a number, it is infinity.
6) Triangles: “Or Three’s not Always a Crowd”? The triangle is a very special shape. It is the strongest, simplest, closed geometrical shape there is. Three lines and three angles. Triangles are so important that a whole branch of mathematics has been created around the triangle. Its called trigonometry. When we look around us we see how these special shapes are put to good use. When we compare the strengths of the various shapes and see how they stack up against the triangle, it's not surprising the best is the triangle. Even the simplest machines like the lever work with the triangle as its basic principle. Archimedes said that through the use of the lever, which of course uses the principle of the triangle, he could move the Earth if someone could provide him with a place to stand.
7) Numbers and Numerals: “Everything Counts” What would happen is all the numerals in the world were suddenly to disappear? What would happen to business transactions, telling time or even sports. How did numerals get started anyway? People, in what is now Israel and Jordan, used notches in bone to record sequences of numbers almost twenty thousand years ago. Mesopotamians used clay tokens to record numbers of animals and measures of rice, eight thousand years ago and Sumerians first standardized numerals in 3,000 BC. What can you do with numerals besides counting? Maybe it all started with our fingers and toes.
8) Arithmetic: “It all Adds Up” What can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. How do you do it and why? Add one plus one. What is the answer? How do you know? Does it work for everything? Add a cup of pebbles to a cup of fine sand. What happens? Does one plus one add up to two in this case? I don’t think so! And how does multiplication work? Who discovered it? Arithmetic is based on logic and is sometimes called the Queen of Mathematics. Accountants, bankers, stock brokers, doctors all use arithmetic. What would happen if there was no arithmetic?
9) Dimensions: “2D or Not 2D”. What is a dimension? Imagine a world like Flatland where there are only two dimensions, width and length and where there is no such thing as height. In our world we have four dimensions, length, height, width and time and sometimes it is hard to imagine what it would be like without height. But, there are ways to look at what it might be like. You can use shadows or the puzzle of the Mobius strip, a loop of paper that has only one side are clues to the world of dimensions to change from 3 to 2 dimensions. Painting, drawing and writing are all also usually done in two dimensions. Even a flat computer monitor let’s you see the world of 3-D in 2-D.
10) Surfaces: “Skimming the Surface” There is the top of a table, flat and smooth. There is also the skin of an apple rounded and smooth. What about a saddle? They are all surfaces. What happens when you try to flatten them out? Even your intestines get into the act. If you could flatten and stretch them out they would cover an area larger than your home. Surfaces are like skin that covers anything. Ancient sailors thought the Earth was flat. Bring in Henry the Navigator, a great sailor, to tell us how he discovered that the world was not flat. How far is the horizon? Why does the Earth appear flat? What evidence do we have that the Earth is round? These are all questions that Henry had to ask and eventually answer as he learned about a very important surface...the Earth.
11) Shapes: “The Shape of Things to Come” What is the difference between a triangle and circle? What about an oblate spheroid and a parallelepiped? What about a parabola and a straight line? What is the most common shape there is? Let’s look around and make a list of the shapes that we see. What shape is the moon, the sun, the stars? Why the circle of course. The famous Ptolemy thought that everything in the heavens travelled in circles and that all circles were divine. The early Catholic church agreed and it was heresy to say otherwise. No other animal or plant uses the circle as much as people do.
12) Volumes:“Turning Up the Volume” How much stuff goes into something? How can I tell whether this glass will hold as much as this bottle? What about the pyramid and sphere? An elephant is strong but an ant is stronger. How? It all has to do with volume. An ant can lift six times its weight, but an elephant only a fraction of its own weight. Why? What is heavier? A kilogramme of feathers or a kilogramme of lead. What is the difference between the two? If you said volume, you’d be correct. How do you make a volume? For that you need height, width and length. How do you measure volumes? Why are more voluminous animals found in the cold climates. Why does a small bird have to eat all the time in the cold winter just to stay warm? And why doesn’t a moose? Space and volume make the difference?
13) Measuring: “By Any Measure” How big is big and how small is small? What is the smallest and what is the biggest length...area....volume? What about measuring time. A ruler won’t work, but a clock will. What is time? Measuring two things at once. The difference between speed and velocity. How fast and where? Why do we measure? Look at all the things that we measure. Time, money, height, distance, patience, acceleration. Hammurabi and his first code had to do with measures and compensation for things that are measured. He gave us measuring laws. How do we know the size of an electron or a star if we can’t really go there to measure them? We can even use light to measure things. Try cooking without measuring. Try anything without measuring...sports, shoes, shopping.....even barter and more.
14) Beach Math: The AfterMath Crew go to the beach and learn about weather, rain, thunderstorms, sunshine, tides and waves and even sunblock!. They also learn how to make an hourglass and talk with Copernicus about the sun and earth.
15. Night Math The night is scarey! And there are a host of myths and superstitions around the Moon. The Crew finds out from Galileo what is fact and what is fancy, discover parallax and even decipher an alien message.
16. Colour Math RGB and dying hair! Colour is everywhere! The crew learn about additive and subtractive colours, and even talk with Isaac Newton who teaches them how to make a prism and change white light into 7 different colours.
17. Code math Morse Code and secret messages. There is binary made up of ones and zeroes. Getting a message across is a very simple thing, if you know the code. The crew makes invisible ink and even learns pig Latin!
18. Enviro Math Exponential growth and all that stuff come into play as the crew learns about the finite world. They make an environment friendly oven using solar heat and meet with Leonardo of Pisa.
19. Hand math Left, Right, Symmetry and finding out that the universe is indeed a right handed place. What does baseball have to do with left handers? The crew finds out and even makes a symmetrical magnetic field.
20. Play Math AfterMath goes to the olympics and finds out the math in playing. They make a boomerang and learn about Bernoulli numbers, what makes a plane fly!
21. Direction Math They are lost again and without a compass! The crew takes the time to learn about what clocks have to do with navigation and what animals can find theirt way around without help!
22. Building Math The clubhouse needs repair! Its in bad shape. The crew finds out that mathematics and building go hand in hand as they measure and construct their way into shapes, sizes and volumes.
23. Cooking Math A tasty show that has them making a recipe with mathematical precision. Whether its a pinch, a pound or a kilogramme, the crew concocts the math and a tasty treat.
24. Music Math The tune’s what counts as the crew makes a unique musical instrument, learn about timing and even compass their own music and create their own brand of beautiful music.
25. Money Math Banks and more banks! The crew’s interest is in the principle and discovering how making money without risk is a risky proposition in itself!
26. Flying Math This where the show gets off the ground. Speed, altitude and even the weather all come up with numbers and send the crew soaring on another episode of the AfterMath Crew.
The AfterMath CD and CD Teacher’s Guides (Samples Available upon request) I also created an interactive game about Mathematics for kids. Its called AfterMath InterActive. Its based on the TV series concept and has animation, graphics, teacher’s guides and whole lot more!