More Educational Programming to Supplement At-Home Learning
Daniel Hautzinger
September 14, 2020
Beginning Monday, September 14, WTTW Prime (over-the-air channel 11.2, channel 367 for Comcast subscribers, and channel 37 for RCN subscribers) will host an afternoon block with shows that will provide educational content for students who are learning remotely. The 2:00 pm hour will focus on science shows, 3:00 pm will cover nature and geography, and 4:00 pm are devoted to literature, history, and social studies.
Here are the shows that will be airing throughout the week to help education from home.
Science at 2:00 pm
Breakthrough: Ideas That Changed The World
Take a mind-blowing journey through human history, told through six iconic objects that modern people take for granted, and see how science, invention, and technology built on one another to change everything.
How We Got to Now with Steven Johnson
Topics explored in the series include why and how ideas happen, and their sometimes unintended results, including how the search for clean water opened the way to invention of the iPhone, and how the nagging problem of overheating in a New York printing business led to the invention of air conditioning, which inspired mass migration and a political transformation.
Join the late Professor Stephen Hawking as he reveals our true potential in a series that challenges a selection of volunteers and viewers to think like the greatest geniuses of the past and answer some of humanity's toughest and most enduring questions.
Dr. David Eagleman takes viewers on an extraordinary journey, exploring how the brain, locked in silence and darkness without direct access to the world, conjures the rich and beautiful world we all take for granted.
Explore the internal mechanics of the human body through pioneering graphics and captivating scientific case studies. Witness the fascinating and finely tuned systems that keep the body motoring and the scientists guessing.
Food is a simple pleasure; the science behind it is decidedly not. Physics, chemistry, and biology lie hidden in every bite, and every bite sets off a chain of reactions within in your body that are conditioned by eons of evolution.
Power Trip: The Story of Energy
Take a journey through the past, present, and future of energy, humanity's most important resource, and uncover the hidden energy that is embedded in six major facets of our modern way of life.
Nature and Geography at 3:00 pm
Rivers of Life: The Nile, The Amazon, The Mississippi
The Nile is the world's longest river. Its great length provides a lifeline for Africa's wildest beasts and for some of the world's most incredible cultures. The Amazon, the greatest river system on Earth, amasses one-fifth of Earth's freshwater as it flows east from the Andes to the Atlantic. The Mississippi River stretches into nearly half of America. Explore its waterfalls, wildlife, and swamps.
Follow the animals of Yellowstone as they survive one of the harshest temperature swings in the world: a 140-degree change from winter to summer. Wolves, bison, grizzlies, beavers, and owls all weather the fierce environment.
Explore some of the planet's most awe-inspiring spiritual buildings and learn about the the rites that go on inside.
Plunge into the Pacific, an ocean that covers a third of the Earth's surface, with researchers and cinematographers and see the ocean's rare and dazzling creatures in a way never before seen on television.
Catch a uniquely intimate view of animals and discover their incredibly humanlike behavior using 34 "Spy Creatures," robots designed to look, move, and sound like real animals. Each episode explores a different aspect of animal behavior: love, intelligence, friendship, and bad behavior. Learn more about the spy creatures in our interview with the producer.
Discover the hardy people and wildlife who live on the craggy slopes of the Rockies, the Andes, and the Himalayas, high up in the sky.
See how animals like adorable otters make their homes in cities across the globe, traveling in and out of them for food and shelter and coping with displacement in the face of urban growth.
The forces of nature have kept Earth on the move since it was formed billions of years ago. Though we can't feel the motion, we experience the consequences, from tidal bores surging through the Amazon rainforest to the ruinous power of hurricanes.
Cameras in space tell stories of life on our planet from a brand new perspective, revealing its incredible movements, colors, patterns, and just how fast it is changing.
Literature, History, and Social Studies at 4:00 pm
Explore the seedbed civilizations of Mesoamerica, the Middle East, and the Indus Valley to learn how and why early humans, who had been mobile foragers, created villages, towns, cities, and states, establishing the blueprint for the modern world.
Examine the power, passion and joy of reading through the lens of America's 100 best-loved books. Plus, find author interviews, book-related features, and share your own favorite book at wttw.com/read.
Travel through more than 15,000 years of the Americas, discovering some of the most advanced cultures in human history, massive cities, unique systems of science, art, writing, and belief, and much more of the purposefully forgotten history of Native America.
A group of 21st-century people move into a recreation of a Victorian tenement in London's East End and struggle to survive in the conditions of London's 19th-century working poor.
Asian Americans are America's fastest-growing racial/ethnic group, partially because that designation contains multitudes: Indian Americans, Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and more. Instead of approaching Asian Americans as a monolithic group, this three-part series examines individual stories and personal narratives.
From the early settlement and conquests of the 1500s through the present day, watch the story of a gradual construction of a new American identity from a multitude of diverse sources in the face of both struggle and celebration.
Join historian Lucy Worsley as she examines how royal history is made, from myths, facts, exaggeration, and time.
