This project is to create animated, musical public service videos and accompanying open source digital books featuring a community-developed Indonesian superhero who harnesses her inner powers to face environmental challenges. By co-producing the superhero's adventures with the community, we will draw upon the performative aspects of traditional Indonesian shadow play to engage children as participants -- rather than as passive listeners -- to learn, evaluate and take action on the environment.
Several Indonesian governors recently enacted regulations to address climate change. These regulations are critical, but will be effective in the long term only if accompanied by a change in attitude, culture and behavior, especially among children. Our project capitalizes and connects a renewed emphasis on local values and traditions in Indonesia with a heightened awareness of climate change in order to change attitudes, culture and behavior among children for a more sustainable planet.
Modeled after traditional Indonesian shadow puppet storytellers, our community developed, local language speaking digital superhero will have conversations with and seek advice from children, environmental experts, elders and others about what children can do to help improve the environment. We will turn these conversations into animated musical public service videos and open source digital books for the purpose of changing attitudes and behavior among children in the context of local values.
About 25% of Indonesians are 14 or under, amounting to about 64 million children. Our goal is to use the community developed digital superhero to change the way that Indonesian children -- and eventually children throughout the world -- think about climate change and take action, including demanding change among adults, for a world that is environmentally and culturally sustainable for them and their children's children.
This project has provided additional documentation in a XLSX file (projdoc.xlsx).
