Animation 1: Starling Discovers the Moon - Story: Young Starling makes a startling discovery one night: Earth's Moon seems to be smaller than the last time she saw it. Can this be? Worried, she begins to chart the state of the Moon every night, which only confirms her worst fears: the Moon is disappearing!!! When she rushes around like Chicken Little, frantically warning everyone, they're amused at her concern (and naivete), and try to calm her down... but no one effectively explains how the Moon waxes and wanes over the course of each month. Determined to save what's left of the Moon from disappearing altogether, Starling decides to travel all the way up there herself and do what she can to avert this catastrophe. Curriculum Focus: Collecting data and drawing conclusions through observation. Interstitial 1: "MD Science Center 9: Day and Night on Moon". Animation 2: Three Racers and a Baby Robot - Story: While he's distracted one morning, Coot's new baby robot escapes from his workshop! Lost, it roams around the school campus until it adopts Robyn as its new owner. Dinky, as Robyn affectionately names the little bot, followers her around everywhere and displays a surprisingly diverse array of talents. As she and her friends spend more and more time with Dinky, they learn more about what it can do. Meanwhile, a worried Coot searches high and low for his missing robot. When Robyn finds out who Dinky really is, will she be able to give up her new "pet"? Curriculum Focus: Ongoing learning - developing hypotheses, modeling flexible thinking and being open to unexpected discoveries. Interstitial 2: "Space Art 1-Draw/Build a Robot". Character Bio: Eagle.
