DISCOVERY
Date Initiated: May 2001

Too often the commercial marketplace, rather than children's developmental needs, determines media content. As interactive media becomes an increasingly large part of children's lives, it is important that we begin developing commercially viable programs that seamlessly blend education and entertainment. Markle partnered with the Discovery Channel to plan a commercial, interactive media business, founded on developmental research, which examines the impact of interactive technologies on children, ages pre-school through twelve.

This partnership charted new models for extending Discovery's television content and assets across multiple media platforms in order to find new ways of enhancing the fundamentally interactive and "kid-centric" process of discovery. Together, Markle and Discovery worked to plan, implement, evaluate, and disseminate the results of a series of workshops, which will determine the feasibility of crafting and distributing engaging, educational, interactive multi-media services for children. The primary distribution for these interactive services was across the television and Internet platforms of "Ready Set Learn" for pre-schoolers and "Discovery Kids" for 6 to 12-year-olds. Additionally, Discovery aims to use the workshops to think about possible distribution channels in other formats, such as broadband, CD Rom, videogames, wireless devices, and interactive toys. This project helped to create a broad continuum of developmentally appropriate, curriculum-based interactive content for children of all ages.