BECA Moves!

Students in the BECA class, TV/Video Program Design have taken up the challenge posed by Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign. In their class, BECA 425/725, students are developing an educational television series aimed at six- to eight-year-olds, based on the concept of Obama's Let's Move, an effort to fight childhood obesity.

In the class, students develop the design for a television series, based on a topic and a target audience, presented by Professor Betsy Blosser, at the beginning of the semester. When the course begins, the series is no more than that - a concept, based on a target audience and a topic. Throughout the semester, students go through the steps followed by series designers so that, by the end of the semester, they have a series concept, supported by a plan for 13 half hours, many scripts, and even an idea for finding funding. Students take on different roles - target audience specialist, topic expert, curriculum specialist, writer, fundraiser - across the semester to carry out the design process, influenced heavily by the process developed by the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop) in the creation of Sesame Street.

Topics and target audiences for the class change each time the course is offered, and often reflect what is going on in society at the time. Given the efforts of Mrs. Obama, the semester's topic is particularly timely. And it turns out that graduate student Ashley Larson, a student in the class, got a head start on the project. In the spring, in an independent study with Professor Marty González, Ashley produced a five-part news series on the Bay Area's efforts to become involved with Let's Move. Students in the class were able to view Ashley's work and ask questions about it. The task ahead, now, for both Ashley and the rest of the class is to tailor the information about nutrition and exercise to a young audience of six- to eight-year-olds. Onward!