Episode 64: When You Wonder, What Mr Rogers can teach us about the power of curiosity.

Mr. Rogers spent his life exploring, teaching, practicing, and learning about the power of kindness, wonder, curiosity, & how being there for others, supporting them on their journey of growth, & discovery was more important than anything else. He wasn’t a saint or some mythical hero, he practiced the hard work of being kind, fostering the love, & learning that comes from seeing the world afresh & new from the eyes of a child. Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was a real place called Pittsburgh, today we’ll be joined by this generation’s leaders and lovers of wonder, of making, of learning.

Guests from Pittsburgh’s Remake Learning initiative and authors of the new book, “When You Wonder…You’re Learning” Gregg Behr, & Ryan Rydzewski, the Director (& resident mad scientist inventor) of the Smithsonian’s STEAM! lab, Tim Pula, the co-founder of Learn with Mochi and education leader at Autodesk, Daria Zhao, & teen innovator and burgeoning YouTube star Jason Garland of JG’s Garden at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild. 

They’ll help us learn about how wonder, curiosity, creativity, collaboration, art, science, design, & the joy of making all come together to inspire the next generation (and some of us from the last generation) & help us grow, discover our potential, & our purpose. To become more fully ourselves. We’ll explore how we learn thru wonder, how to capture it when it’s lost, how to foster it at scale, how to build equity, and the often invisible science behind Mr. Rogers & his neighborhood. 

1. Goodness and the kind kids. 

Gregg Behr has been a force of Nature in the Pittsburgh kids & creativity movement which has now transformed into a multi-region initiative called Remake Learning. As the executive director of the Grable Foundation with a mission to foster the best place in the world to raise a kid he quietly built a movement across startups, universities, schools, teachers, parents, foundations, and major employers that provides a template for how to remake and reimagine learning to prepare citizens for to build a better, kinder, gracious world. He and Ryan Rydzewski—who was a school teacher and a writer/journalist co-authored a new book that’s premiering this month about the science and art of Wonder. They’ll report from Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood about the ways wonder has inspired a rebirth and flourishing of community.

2. Let’s visit JG’s Garden!

Jason Garland is a vegan gardener, teen maker, & burgeoning Youtube star whose goals are to live off his own produce & create fun-loving experiences & memories. JG will take us to his garden and give us the insider’s view on how he fell in love with nature’s bounty through wonder & learning.

3. Building a virtual Smithsonian in every kid’s home?

During the pandemic kids, parents, & school teachers found themselves lost for ways to connect with the amazing experience of wonder found in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Tim Pula, the lab’s resident mad scientist inventor worked with Autodesk’s Tinkercad team to blend everything from–hands-on learning, the amazing collection from the museum that had been digitized into virtual 3D objects & interactive presentations, & playful projects that families could do at home — into a new kind of massively distributed experiment in curiosity, wonder & learning. Tim will take us behind the scenes and show us how to do play with science.

4. From mind to design, tinkering to learn.

Daria Zhao started as a Wall Street analyst. One weekend while exploring the Bay Area, she wandered into her first Maker Faire. The community of makers she discovered was unlike anything she’d encountered before. She realized the best way she could invest her time was in kids & learning.  She founded a startup dedicated to creating a screen-free alternative to learning how to code and build robots called “Learn with Mochi.” They’ve taught thousands of kids in 62 countries how to play with code in tangible ways. Now she’s a part of Autodesk’s efforts to democratize making for the next generation by helping kids learn the building blocks of 3D literacy, & overcome the fear of making through peer learning. She’ll share how Instructables and Tinkercad are opening up the doors of wonder to kids throughout the world.