Hands-on to hands-off: How this learning center went digital to teach kids during COVID

Miss Know and Miss Information are an odd couple, to say the least. Wacky, clueless, pigtail-wearing Miss Information is pretty sure she knows everything about science, including that it’s boring and repetitive and definitely not for kids. Fortunately, Miss Know — wise, patient, with a more adult hairstyle — is there to set her straight.

“Actually, Miss Information, kids can be scientists,” she says. “Don’t you love to go outside and play? As long as you have a curiosity, you can totally be a scientist.”

The two characters are featured in “The Living Think,” a new series of educational videos by the Living Arts & Science Center. The engagingly funny yet substantive series, which began production in late May, premiered its first weekly episode Thursday — called “What Is Science?” — on LASC’s YouTube channel.

The center’s first-ever foray into the digital realm was prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, which forced LASC to cancel its in-person, highly interactive classes and camps in mid-March and furlough most of its staff, including executive director Lori Halligan.

“We’re known for art, we’re known for science, and we’re very much known for hands-on learning,” says Halligan, who returned to work last month. “With the current situation with COVID-19, we really can’t do that. We can’t have students in our building. We can’t have our classes and camps that we’re so well known for.”

The solution to this dilemma, at least until the center can return to normal operations, is “The Living Think.” Aimed at students from between 8 and 12 years old, the 24-episode series is being written and performed by members of the LASC staff, including development director Laurie Genet Preston and science educator Heather Donlan, who play Miss Information and Miss Know, respectively.

“The challenge is how to go from hands-on to hands-off while still providing the best programming,” says Preston, a veteran of Lexington stages and independent films who brings an elastic face and well-honed comic timing to the appropriately named Miss Information. “It’s a reinvention of who we are.”

The videos will be recorded and edited by the Lexington-based Suburban Tollyho Productions, whose credits include work on several TV shows and feature films such as the critically praised “American Animals” (2018), based on the true story of a notorious rare-book heist at Transylvania University.

To minimize possible exposure to the coronavirus, the first episode, “What Is Science?,” was shot with a bare-bones crew of one person, Suburban Tollyho’s Lindsey Hancock Williamson, who functioned as director, camera operator and sound technician.

“Normally we would have a little bit more of a crew for something like this — I’ve overseen teams of 30 people in the past,” Williamson says with a laugh. “But because of the times we’re living in, we’re trying to keep it real streamlined and get things done in a safe way.”

During the shooting of the five-minute episode, “What Is Science?,” safety precautions included keeping the performers socially distanced at least six feet apart on their fanciful laboratory set decorated with loads of quirky stuff, including a poster of Sir Isaac Newton wearing a hot-pink feather boa.

Accordingly, several exchanges of dialogue between Miss Know and Miss Information — which under pre-pandemic conditions would have been shot with the performers inches apart — were recorded twice, once focusing on the speaker, a second time focusing on the listener’s reactions.

In the latter, Preston’s experience as an actor and former schoolteacher served her well. “My longest time as a teacher was in the middle school range,” she says, “so I understand the kids’ needs to be entertained by humor in educational videos.”

And as it happens, she and her co-star are playing exaggerated versions of themselves in the videos.

“Heather is a science educator in real life, but I’m not a scientist,” Preston says. “So as Miss information, I’m using that idea of being an average Joe who may not know much about science in a way that professional scientists and educators know. That way the kids can say, ’She doesn’t know anything! I know more than she does.’ And that can make the audience feel empowered to learn.”