Tinkercast

Tinkercast is the company behind the #1 kids and family podcast, Wow in the World! 

At Tinkercast, we believe kids deserve agency in a world where the future belongs to them. That is why our mission is to share stories about the amazing things happening in the world. Stories that make us say “wow!” Stories that inspire today’s kids to become the tinkers and thinkers that will shape tomorrow. 

We create award-winning audio-first shows and 360o experiences that bring people together beyond the screen - connecting parents to kids, teachers to students, laughter to learning, and curiosity to innovation. 

Our new EdTech tool, TinkerClass, is a free interactive podcast platform that brings Wow into the school day and guides students to develop 21st century skills as they listen, wonder, tinker and make. 

Our mission is to:

• Decrease the learning gap through listening

• Bring Wow to classrooms everywhere and inspire curiosity, creativity, and connection

• Promote 21st Century Skills

Our team lead, Dr. Natascha Crandall, is our Sr. Director of Research and Child Development. She earned a B.S. in Developmental Psychology from The Pennsylvania State University, a M.A. in Rehabilitation Counseling from The University of Maryland and a Ph.D. in School Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. She has extensive experience in curriculum development, script review, and formative research for many leading television shows. 

Dr. Crandall is a part-time employee of Tinkercast and is responsible for leading and executing all research activities that are geared towards ensuring that our learning goals for children are met. She has also conducted formative research on our EdTech tool, TinkerClass, as part of a three year National Science Foundation grant. To date, her qualitative research has been conducted with teachers, parents, and children and has been a valuable guide to determine the trajectory path of our EdTech tool. She also reviews scripts for other podcasts to ensure that they are both educationally and culturally appropriate for our target audience.  

While Dr. Crandall is currently a part-time employee, she is equipped to handle aspects of the Team Lead position with LEAP. We will prioritize and manage her time so that she will be able to dedicate up to 4 hours per week to this project.  Dr. Crandall has worked as a member of our development team for the TinkerClass project from the start and through its many iterations. She was the Principal Investigator for our National Science Foundation Research Grant, and collected data with teachers and students in three schools (n=157). She has also worked with teachers (traditional classroom, online school, homeschool) during our Beta Testing to gain insight into the various ways teachers could use the product. Dr. Crandall is also skilled at research and has the background knowledge of our company, and our program’s needs along with the research skills for this undertaking. This sets her up to be a good pairing with the LEAP representatives for this project. 

TinkerClass is a project-based learning platform that uses 21st century skills to guide students to listen, wonder, tinker and make!

For the last decade, 60% of the 35.5 million elementary school students consistently performed below proficiency in reading, math and science. Post-pandemic, those numbers have risen by 3%.  For fourth graders, the achievement gap between lower-level learners and students at the top of their class became even more exacerbated. The large majority of lower-level learners are Black, Latinx, and low-income children, furthering inequities in education and eventually the workplace. Education policies such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core Standards were designed to improve standardized test scores, causing teachers to “teach to the test” rather than addressing variability in learning and building foundational competencies like listening comprehension and 21st century skills. Yet, research shows that improving a students’ level of listening comprehension in elementary school is the single greatest influence on their reading comprehension and academic success.  Children can comprehend two to three grade levels higher through listening than reading, and they are more creative, better at retaining information, and better at problem solving.  On top of that, when people are exposed to stories and experiences that inspire WOW and awe, they are more curious, creative, connected and conscientious afterwards.  

Tinkercast is on a mission to add more WOW to kids’ worlds!  We do that through award-winning podcasts, books, live experiences and via our solution- a new educational technology product. Our solution is a highly engaging web-based app where elementary school students LISTEN to audio stories about real-world phenomena, WONDER and reflect on what they heard, TINKER with others to come up with one big wonder or real-world challenge they want to build a project around, and MAKE and present their prototype or experiment that solves a real-world challenge.  

Surveys tell us that when listening to science podcast, Wow in the World, children are highly engaged during and afterwards with 75% asking questions about what they heard, 78% reenacting or “playing” with what they heard, 45% talking about what they learned with others, and 29% requesting to do an activity described in the podcast (NPR).  When listening and building projects around Wow in the World episodes in schools, teachers reported their lower-level learners performed as well as the high-level learners.  One teacher stated, “Reluctant, lower-level readers excelled in our project work and learning. In fact, my lowest-level readers are my best tinkerers with this program. These students were engaged on a level playing field with their peers as they listened to facts and information shared in an engaging way. When followed by the opportunity to write, draw, or speak their reaction to listening, those same students were able to more effectively articulate their learning.” Our solution will bring WOW to the classroom and ultimately lessen the achievement gap using engaging audio stories that heighten creativity, retention and comprehension to spark curious reflection, collaborative projects, critical thinking and creative innovation so that all children can have the confidence to be the thinkers and tinkerers that will shape tomorrow.   

Our solution was designed with six playful principles to make learning fun and effective for kids: Active, Engaging, Socially Interactive, Iterative, Meaningful, and Joyful. It can be accessed for free and will be the first of its kind to fuse compelling science based source material from the children’s podcast, with hands-on project based learning activities that support both NGSS standards as well as 21st Century skills.

Our company has done extensive literature reviews to examine the gaps in learning, the pedagogical strategies that have been identified as being effective, as well as the established solutions that exist in the market today.  

From 2020 to 2022, a student-facing solution was created and formative research was conducted in 10 classrooms with K-5 students (n=150). Our solution featured an avatar builder, a search engine, a podcast player, a reflection and ideation creation tool, a multimedia project engine with tools to support slideshow, audio presentation, and poster creations, and 10 guided interactive activities that align with NGSS standards.  In addition, a teacher console and 3 assessment rubrics were developed and tested with 7 teachers. The prevailing product offers flexible options for use individually, in small groups, or as an entire class and operates on any web browser with standard bandwidth. It is a highly modular, flexible, and customizable platform that science, STEAM, and general education teachers can use across grade levels, curriculum, class schedules, and student proficiency. In 2023, we conducted a beta test with an additional 7 teachers and their students (n=290). 

Research revealed that teachers and students were enthusiastic about using our solution. Student engagement with our solution was high throughout all portions, as was appeal. Their greatest challenge remains to be the ability to come up with a viable research question for their experiments. The guided activities somewhat helped with this, but this area needs added support from teachers. Regardless, teachers reported that two-thirds of the students were more engaged and one third was just as engaged in our solution’s activities when compared to when other activities were introduced to them.

Teachers felt that our solution helped both low level learners as well as gifted students. For low level learners, having the content be audio based put them on a level playing field with others. For gifted students, they were forced to collaborate with others, instead of doing projects alone because they find it easier, and this benefited them greatly.  In terms of the 21st century skills, all teachers felt that our product helped their students increase their Content (scientific thinking), Creativity, Confidence, Collaboration, and Communication. In terms of Confidence, only some teachers felt that their students’ confidence with science increased because of TinkerClass. Teachers felt that the prototype was an effective learning tool that enhanced STEM among school aged children and felt that this program would be a great additive to teachers’ digital learning tools and could enhance their current repertoire of programs. The teacher’s console had mixed reviews. They liked using the console and liked being able to assign projects to students and could see their students’ work. However, they felt that the console was a bit confusing and crowded, which made it difficult to master easily. 

Tinkerclass has spent a few years developing a tool with and for teachers and their students. Our solution has been refined a number of times to come up with the best approach to assist teachers with science-based project learning activities, which appears to be successful. Despite the positive feedback from teachers and students, we are interested in adding evidence of our impact with a summative assessment that will provide data to show that our solution can move the needle in terms of learning gains for all types of learners, measurably increase 21st century skills and decrease achievement gaps for Black, Latinx, low-income and English-language-learners. We feel that this is the type of evidence that will change the solution from being a beneficial tool to a necessary tool for teachers to implement in their classrooms. Our solution is free of charge and does not collect personal data from students or teachers. Thus, with clear impact, we will help convince school administrators to add WOW to their schools and help close the achievement gaps for the future thinkers and tinkerers of tomorrow. 

We have just completed a $1M Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation. We have conducted research with a total of 121 teachers and 502 students. We have refined the program and conducted our Beta test and our solution will be rolled out to the public in September 2023. We would like to extend the research and believe that an impact assessment occurring within the next year would add support to the program and help reach and ultimately help more students of various learning styles. By determining an appropriate strategy now, we can determine the amount of funding needed to effectively implement the strategy, and work towards finding the right funding sources. 

Our research questions are: 

1. Does our solution have a measurable impact on engagement and learning outcomes for lower level learners? 

2. Does our solution make a significant impact in terms of the 21st century skills for students in grades K-5? 

3. Does our solution significantly increase scientific inquiry process skills for children in grades K-5? 

4. Does our solution significantly increase science based knowledge that aligns with NGSS standards for students in grades K-5?

Tinkercast is dedicated to the mission to help children through the power of audio by sparking curiosity through high level content, and helping them be creative and think critically about the world around them. To that end, we are prepared and committed to conduct more research to support and refine our solution. With a clear strategy and roadmap to collect and analyze data, our research team will be able to determine how effective our current solution is in moving the needle and then make more informed decisions regarding future iterations of the product. Additionally, Tinkercast intends to expand the solution to support more subject areas (i.e., social studies, English Language Arts, etc.) with various podcasts and project ideas. By determining how to assess impact, the LEAP project sprint will help to inform our research in the near and far future to effectively help in all subject areas across elementary school with all types of learners. 

To date, we’ve carried out prototype and beta testing in 8 U.S. elementary schools with over 500 students and 27 teachers and found that classrooms that use TinkerClass see advanced listening comprehension, content acquisition, communication, critical thinking, creativity and was very to extremely effective in supporting collaboration across all levels of student proficiency and across interdisciplinary subjects (ELA, science, history, math, STEAM).  

Our unfair advantage is that we the stand-out leaders in children’s podcasting (with 200 million downloads to date) and we will use our popularity and name recognition to spark systemic changes in education, shining a spotlight on the value of listening skills as a tool to bridge achievement gaps and catapult critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and confidence in all learners. 

The LEAP Project outputs will be used as a strategy to recruit subjects and schools, create assessment materials, implement assessments, and analyze results. Depending on the timing of the LEAP project, along with the marketing strategy used by Tinkercast Marketing to promote our solution, we intend to implement the study within a year of the LEAP recommendations. This may be dependent upon funding and thus we may also need to apply for grants in order to effectively roll out the research. 

Our immediate goals are to help teachers efficiently and effectively incorporate STEAM education and project-based-learning into their school day and to highlight listening skills as a pathway to literacy, critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and communication.  These immediate goals link to our long-term outcomes including decreasing the achievement for Black, Latinx, low-income and English-language-learners and setting all children up for a lifetime of success as thinkers, tinkerers and innovators.  

In the short term, Tinkercast plans to use the outcomes from the LEAP project to assess the impact of our solution and further refine the offerings as needed. Ideally, findings from our research will help to further promote our solution as a way to help children of all learning types. In the long term, as we develop new podcasts and extend the repertoire of material to support multiple subject areas, impact studies will be completed with extensions to ensure that we maintain high standards in what we provide students, teachers, and families.