by Jose de Esteban
The brainchild of Kate Conway and Grant Davies, Bristol-based Pumpkin Interactive travels the world to find the best possible footage to produce resources relevant to the needs of both teachers and students in the fields of Science, Design and Technology, Textiles, Geography, and Drama and Performance. We spoke to Kate, from the award winning company, about their current work and plans for the future.
How long have you been around and what are the main activities you undertake?
My company, Pumpkin Interactive has been making educational video content for nearly 20 years. We specialise in producing high quality footage for schools, colleges and universities. We are a small team and carry out all our own research, filming and editing. Our titles are sold to English speaking educational institutions all around the world. We also license our material to educational publishers and broadcasters.
What are your main subject areas and specialisations?
Our main subject specialism is Geography and Environmental science. We travel all round the world filming interesting case studies for our programmes. This can take us to Haiti, to film the impacts of the earthquake, to Borneo and the Amazon rainforest to look at the Tropical rainforest ecosystem and the impacts of deforestation, or to Bangalore to look at the impacts of rapid urbanisation. We are a husband and wife team and both studied Geography at University. We then went on to work for the BBC as journalists and film producers, before setting up our own independent production company in the late 1990s.
Is the content you distribute aimed at a particular educational sector?
The majority of our content is aimed at students studying GCSEs, GCEs and Degree level. Our main market is schools and Further and Higher Educational Institutions.
Is your material available to stream/download as well as in DVD format?
It is an exciting time at the moment for us as we are about to make our material available as downloads. Hopefully by the end of 2018, schools, colleges and universities, as well as individual students, should be able to download our material from our website, much as you would download an I-Tune.
Do you offer a digital site licence?
Yes we do offer a digital site licence. This is offered free to schools for the price of the DVD. However if you are a sixth form or Further Education college or university we make an additional charge for a digital site licence.
Could you give some information about your latest release or pick a single title that encapsulates what you are all about?
We work closely with leading educational consultants in the field of Geography and Environmental Science to ensure our material is reflecting the most up to date discourse in that subject area. For us, the past year has been all about creating materials that look at the carbon and water cycles. This is a big new area for the Geography GCEs and is also now being taught at GCSE level. Where once students may have studied the rainforest and the issues and impacts of deforestation, now they’re being encouraged to understand this within the context of water and carbon cycles. For many teachers this is a new and challenging area of the specification. By focusing on these areas in our materials, we’re hoping to be able to offer a new resource that brings the theory to life, by explaining it through the use of interesting case studies. Last summer we travelled to the Canadian arctic to visit and film with a research station on the tundra, looking at the effects of climate change on the water cycle. We also travelled to Borneo where we filmed in one of the world’s leading rainforest research stations where research was taking place into all aspects of carbon and water cycling in the rainforest. We are hoping that this new material will start to be available to customers from Spring 2018.
About The Author
Jose de Esteban is Information Officer at Learning on Screen