Educational cartoons, what's behind them?!

Did you ever stop and think about why cartoons are how they are and what they teach us? Cartoons appeared at the end of the 19th. century and since then have gone through big changes. In the early days the were colorless and whitout sound, today it's an explosion of colors and yelling. Every cartoon had a message related to the social and political structure of its time. 

Then came the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's with cartoons which portrayed the family's everyday problems, regardless how weird. Some examples are Felix The Cat, Mickey, Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry .

During the 90's there was another transformation and chases, fighting between the characters, victory of the good guys, and often finished with a moral lesson or a dry joke (or both) were born. Humor got more sophisticated during the 90's. Parodies became more and more common and jokes more elaborated. Then, adult cartoons such as South Park, Simpsons and others were introduced.

Amidst all that there are also educational cartoons teaching small children basic concepts of math, logic, social rules among other. The first cartoons of this kind which were quite successful were Sesame Street and Blue's Clues. 

Sesame Street from the US was as successful there as it was in Brazil. Each episode was planned by a team of specialists, tested with children and then filmed and broadcast. They took the educational question very seriously.

I'd like to highlight a particular episode to illustrate how the program works. Teachers and the Sesame Street team know the importance that executive functions play in children's learning (self-control, attention control, and the ability to resist temptation). So they adapted a research conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel of Stanford University from the 70s known as the Marshmallow Test, in which one goal was to test children's self-control. This is the presentation by Joaquim Posada in a TED Talk, where he tells and briefly illustrates this research: (to activate the caption, click 'Details' on the screen )

So the team of experts adapted this research and created a song, within the episode, in which the Cookie Monster character should resist its temptation to devour the cookies and create a strategy for this. Here is the music video (in English):

This example is just one of the thousands of episodes that the program Vila Sesámo reproduced. The purpose of the post is to raise awareness of what is being reproduced in the cartoons and draw attention to educational cartoons.

See you next time,
Laura

SOURCE:
GOLEMAN, D. O foco: a atenção e seu papel fundamental para o sucesso. Editora Objetiva, 2014.
GLADWELL, M. Tipping point. Little, Brown and Company, 2000.