At Agenda, we like to go the extra mile for our clients.
At most agencies, that might mean pulling a late night, working from home on the weekends, calling all hands on deck for a rush job.
But how many other firms would have petri dishes of bacteria growing around the office in order to test out science experiments as prep work for building a science education website for their client?
(No, having something moldy growing in the back of the fridge doesn’t count. We’re talking about science here, not slovenliness!)
So why all the petri dish farming? It was all part of an ambitious project we developed for Abbott, the global health care company with a long-running commitment to stimulating children’s interest in the sciences.
Abbott has had great success over the years with a Family Science program that sends top Abbott scientists into elementary schools, community centers, and museums to lead hands-on experiments that teach basic science and problem-solving skills while igniting the spark of scientific curiosity in a child’s mind. Abbott’s Operation Discovery program gives older children a chance to see scientists in action by inviting them to join Abbott employees in conducting hands-on experiments at Abbott laboratories in China, Singapore, Ireland, and the U.S. Together, Operation Discovery and the Family Science program have reached more than 14,000 children, but Abbott wanted to do even more and magnify the impact of the program by extending its education efforts online.
So Abbott teamed with Agenda to build ScienceEd, an online portal filled with programmed web content designed to show children ages 7-14 that science is appealing, accessible, and relevant to their lives.
Why did the world really need another science site? Science museums and other organizations already run a number of websites that show experiments and tell what the results mean.
But Abbott felt that none of these other sites dealt with the emotional side of science. Abbott wanted to show children that science did not have to be distant or scary or untouchable, but rather could be something intimately connected to many facets of their daily lives.
To fulfill Abbott’s vision, Agenda assembled a team of designers, illustrators, animators, editors, strategists, project managers, and programmers. We conducted casting, hired actors, gathered a crew, scripted skits, designed experiments in concert with Abbott scientists, and produced videos of these experiments. (Here’s where the petri dish prep work proved useful!)
We had a particularly fun time doing the interviews for The Spark section of the ScienceEd site, which features Abbott researchers talking about what made them choose a career in the sciences. Who knows? Maybe hearing a neuroscientist talk about how a vanilla ice cream cone triggered her interest in science might be the spark that starts a child down his or her own path toward a science career…
Since science is creative, we wanted to give the audience a chance to create some of the site’s content themselves. So we built a password-protected Lab Crew Club section, where children who participate in the hands-on Family Science and Operation Discovery events can access photos and videos of themselves in full scientific action mode.
The web is often all about what happens right now—the latest tweets, the fastest news updates, instant messages, and chats. That’s why it was so refreshing to work on a project like this that has such worthy long-term goals. It’s exciting to think that ScienceEd could awaken a child to the possibilities of a scientific career and that 20 years later, that child-turned-scientist could be unlocking mysteries and helping to invent cures that could make a real difference in the lives of countless people.
Character Illustrations by David Sossella
