Not a Normal Field Trip
Thirty Years of Multimedia Edutainment and American Science Education on The Magic School Bus
Thirty years ago today, one of the most impactful informal science initiatives in history debuted on American television. To the tune of rock-legend Little Richard, The Magic School Bus (MSB) animated series transported young viewers on field trips to the outer reaches of the solar system and inside the human body. Along the way, a crazy-haired teacher named Ms. Frizzle enabled her multicultural class to “take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!”
MSB catchphrases have become instantly recognizable, Ms. Frizzle costumes are a perennial Halloween favorite of teachers and scientists, and a Netflix reboot recently targeted the offspring of the show’s 1990s viewers.
But MSB is more than a piece of beloved nostalgia. It was a bold experiment that contributed to historic changes in multimedia edutainment and American science education.
Originating in the 1980s as a book series for young readers, MSB grew into a multimedia enterprise that spanned television, computer games, museum exhibitions, toys, and more. While the show lasted just four seasons, a global network of writers, artists, educators, companies, federal agencies, and philanthropies produced a creative output that has reached hundreds of millions of children.
How did MSB take shape as an informal science innovation? How did its team of scientific storytellers¹ work together to pursue their goals? And, what were its impacts for the media industry and science educators today?
In the immortal words of the Frizz, “Seatbelts, Everyone!”
A Multimedia Goldrush
In the 1980s and 1990s, corporate executives spoke of “multimedia” with reverential awe. The merger of publishing, television, and computers promised fortunes for winners and obsolescence for those left behind. Educators and policymakers meanwhile envisioned a revolution in learning, with one Apple-sponsored workshop likening multimedia’s power to Galileo’s telescope.²
Children’s “edutainment” — a once desired and now derided portmanteau of education and entertainment — was especially promising territory where initiatives such as The Voyage of the Mimi, Square One TV, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? had already staked claims.
In the mid-1980s, Craig Walker, an editor at the children’s publisher Scholastic, approached author Joanna Cole and illustrator Bruce Degen with a plan to combine fiction, science, and humor. On the strength of Cole’s imaginative and accurate stories and Degen’s colorful and chaotic style, The Magic School Bus became a bestselling book series and a staple of school lesson plans.
At the start of the 1990s, Scholastic executive Deborah Forte aimed to make the company a multimedia leader. She headed a media division that poached producers and writers from the Children’s Television Workshop to develop a MSB television show. Forte then struck a deal for CD-ROM games with Microsoft, the software giant’s first foray into the emerging edutainment market.
Science for All Americans
Private initiative provided The Magic School Bus’s creative spark, but the government made it a public good.
The late 1980s was a crossroads in science education reform. Since the Nixon era, policy goals of competitiveness and productivity had reoriented federal investment from basic research to innovation. However, many educators resisted this neoliberal orientation and advocated for an “inquiry” approach.³
Meanwhile, civil rights and feminist movements challenged discrimination and demanded access to scientific careers. Advocacy groups such as the AAAS called for “sweeping changes” to enhance scientific literacy and equity rather than focusing only on the scientific pipeline. They argued that science education should begin in kindergarten and “encourage a spirit of healthy questioning.”⁴
A cadre of experts championed “informal science” and the use of television as a reform strategy. In the early 1990s, NSF invested in three new series: MSB; the equally legendary Bill Nye the Science Guy; and Cro, another animated series, created by the Children’s Television Network and based on the book The Way Things Work.
Between 1991 and 2001, MSB received $12 million from NSF with supporting funds from the Department of Energy and the Carnegie Corporation. Aimed at 6- to 9-year-olds with “special attention” to “girls and minority children,” MSB promised to present science accurately and “inspire positive attitudes” about science. MSB’s team included former NSF program officer Michael Templeton and collaborations with museums, curriculum developers, and youth organizations.
Learning from Cartoons
MSB’s path to the small screen was also made possible by regulatory reform in the American television industry. In 1990, the Children’s Television Act (CTA) brought new rules to a medium with a reputation as a commercial wasteland, mandating that all commercial broadcasters provide educational programming for kids.
MSB was a product of public television, airing on PBS with distribution by South Carolina Educational Television. However, it was shaped by the CTA. MSB was to go head-to-head with Saturday morning cartoons, which critics identified as the leading purveyors of violence, ignorance, and advertising.
Scholastic hired those very purveyors to adapt MSB, forming a partnership with Canadian studio Nelvana, known for the Care Bears and Ewoks series. Nelvana in turn relied on South Korea’s Hanho Heung-Up for coloring and production. The show’s commercial approach employed Lily Tomlin and Malcolm Jamal Warner as voice actors as well as frequent guest stars including Dolly Parton.
Boom and Bust
From 1994–98, The Magic School Bus was ascendant. The show aired to glowing reviews, and reached 97% of US television households. Beyond the TV series, MSB CD-ROMs flooded the edutainment market. A touring bus crossed the country visiting schools, libraries, and even Disneyland. Merchandising was ubiquitous via tie-ins with Toys “R” Us, McDonalds, Hasbro, Hallmark, and others.
The animated series, however, shutdown production in 1998. NSF funding had run out and PBS was introducing new internally-produced shows and ramping up its own PBS Kids enterprise. The Fox network, which was under FCC scrutiny for a lack of educational programming, acquired MSB for syndication, but it did not commit to new episodes.
MSB’s animated series was a casualty of an economic bust in a multimedia bubble characterized by lofty business plans and ill-conceived mergers. But it was also a victim of the energies that had given it life, including conflicts between Scholastic and PBS, challenges among partners over contract vs company IP, and the overuse of storylines to meet the demand for ever-more products.
“Take Chances, Make Mistakes, Get Messy”
In our ongoing research on the brief heyday and lasting legacy of The Magic School Bus we are exploring how the enterprise’s creators wrestled with a series of big questions at the center of transformations in new media and informal science education.
What vision of science should be taught?
By the late 1990s, science education solidified in the now dominant frame of “STEM” (later STEAM). The partnerships behind MSB’s production epitomized the innovation-centric STEM model. Yet its content was an exemplar of science as inquiry, foregrounding the wonder of nature and the collective processes of discovery.
How should science be taught?
As a teacher, Ms. Frizzle remains an icon for an increasingly beleaguered profession. Yet as a multimedia enterprise, MSB introduced formalized and seemingly passive modes of educational delivery. Nonetheless, for every substitute teacher using MSB to pacify students, we have found examples of creative projects in which teachers worked with kids to produce their own books and episodes.
Who gets to participate in science?
MSB championed an inclusive vision of science. Ms. Frizzle challenged stereotypes of scientists as authoritative men in lab coats and scientific women as old maids, assistants, or lonely heroines. It was the multicultural students, moreover, who gathered evidence and made choices that created the context for discovery. Science was a collaborative process in which children learned to work together despite differences. Still, the kids of MSB were decidedly American (as was their school bus) and Ms. Frizzle reinforced dominant images of teaching as a white women’s profession.
What learning experiences do different media afford?
MSB took advantage of different media to inform and to amuse. Its books were “hypertextual” with a main story, side quests, and fact boxes that allowed for repeated, non-linear reading. Televised animation used motion and spectacle in linear narratives to bring children into otherwise unreachable environments. The games adopted a first-person “storybook” view in which users could follow the main path, go backward, or play side games. Each medium nonetheless came with constraints that shaped how active or passive, individual or collective, children’s “consumption” was.
Is private gain compatible with public good?
From the 1980s onward media producers and policymakers increasingly brought private industry into public education. Did these collaborations result in synergy or in the privatization of public life?⁵ MSB complicates the picture. Undoubtedly the enterprise contributed to privatization, but, like Sesame Street before it, MSB proved what could be achieved when top creatives worked with top educators.
How do scientific storytellers collaborate?
As MSB grew from books into multimedia, it changed from an intimate partnership into a distributed team that crossed professions, national borders, and media platforms. This model challenged the in-house approach of predecessors such as Mr. Wizard and 3–2–1 Contact. At each point in production, scientific storytellers had to translate their objectives, whether on a script, a visual design, or a game mechanic. Throughout they negotiated demands of improving scientific literacy, entertaining, and making money.
Broader Impacts
Finally, among the most important questions we hope to answer through archival research and oral history interviews with The Magic School Bus’s creators is what counts as “success” in informal science education?
On a celebratory milestone of a series syndicated in more than twenty languages with tens of millions of books printed, it may seem a strange question. But what MSB changed, how to evaluate those changes, and whether the experiment can (or should) be repeated have surprisingly messy answers.
Today’s informal science experts seek to objectively determine the “efficacy” of their initiatives. MSB’s scientific storytellers laid the groundwork for that approach with consultant studies, focus groups, and science advisory boards. However, Nielsen ratings, earnings statements, and sheer chance were arbiters of a different sort of efficacy.
Moreover, evaluating initiatives like MSB are especially hard because their most important outcomes happen long after the fact. How, for example, do you determine if using animation to excite young girls and minorities about science will shape their outlook and career choices decades later (a claim for which there is strong anecdotal evidence)? Conversely, do “franchise properties” based on long-past creative moments hinder innovation in media and education?
Infrastructural impacts are also often only visible in hindsight. For example, many MSB creators later developed Cyberchase, a multimedia enterprise that teaches mathematics using fantasy narratives, now in its fifteenth season. They also set the precedent for media aimed at even younger audiences, including Sid the Science Kid.
The NSF’s own conception of what counts as good science seems to have been permanently shaped by its experiment. Since 1997, the NSF has mandated that all grant recipients incorporate “broader impacts” into their research. These include: “STEM education,” “public engagement,” “inclusion,” “partnerships,” “STEM workforce,” “economic competitiveness,” “infrastructure,” and “societal well-being.”
As the writers of any pilot might tell you, stay tuned for answers because we haven’t yet written them. We invite you to join us for our ongoing exploration of how the scientific storytellers behind The Magic School Bus took chances, made mistakes, and got messy.
- Ingrid Ockert, “The Scientific Storytellers: How Educators, Scientists, and Actors Televised Science,” PhD diss. Princeton University, 2018.
- Apple Education Advisory Council, Proceedings of an Invitational Conference on Multimedia in Education (Cupertino, CA: 1986).
- John L. Rudolph, How We Teach Science: What’s Changed, and Why It Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
- American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science for All Americans: A Project 2061 Report on Literacy Goals in Science, Mathematics, and Technology (Washington, DC: AAAS, 1989).
- Victoria Cain, Schools and Screens: A Watchful History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).
This work is supported by the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), NSF (2341860 and 2341861), Virginia Tech, and Radford University. All opinions are our own.
Matthew Wisnioski is an associate professor of STS at Virginia Tech and author of the forthcoming Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life (MIT Press, 2025).
Michael J. Meindl is an associate professor of Media Production and director of Cinema and Screen Studies at Radford.
