For decades, children over the world have traveled along with a wacky teacher, named Miss Frizzle, who drives the Magic School Bus. There are Magic School Bus books, two cartoon television series, and a video game, with the goal of getting more kids into science.
The Magic School Bus books debuted during a time when media and education were going through cultural shifts.
“The National Science Foundation discovered in the 1980s that kids spent more time watching TV in a week than they did at school,” said Matt Wisnioski, an associate professor of science and society at Virginia Tech.
“At the same time there were very little science education instruction happening at the elementary school level,” Wisnioski said.
The National Science Foundation funded an animated TV series on PBS to help encourage more kids to become scientists. And in many ways, it worked, said Michael Meindl, who teaches media production at Radford University. He’s been working with Wisnioski to write a book about the Magic School Bus.
“So many of these creators talk about people coming up to them saying, ‘I got into science, I became a scientist,’ or ‘I got into the medical field’ because of the magic school bus,” Meindl said.
Meindl said scientists worked alongside writers and animators on the television series. Wisnioski said he’s even found letters kids wrote to the author, Joanna Cole, suggesting plot ideas that she incorporated into the books.
In each story, teacher Miss Frizzle takes the kids into all kinds of wild places. They explore space, and the human body. Many times, they find themselves in dangerous situation.
Wisnioski thinks Miss Frizzle’s catch phrase of “take chances, make mistakes, get messy,” teaches kids that science isn’t just about logic and structure.
“It’s about discovery, and it’s about experimentation, and it’s about this kind of inquisitive mind,” Wisnioski said. “And if you don’t take those steps, to be curious and if you don’t take those steps to try something, you’ll never learn anything new.”
He said the show and book series took chances too. The Magic School bus books have sold more than 93 million copies in 13 countries, and there are 80 episodes of the TV show, including a recent reboot on Netflix. Today, the Magic School Bus is still being read and watched across the world, both in and out of the classroom.
