upworthy

Carly Gillis

True
Cricket Wireless

In the world of Story Pirates, it's not at all unusual to watch a play featuring a talking carrot on Saturn or flying cats.

That's because the playwrights may seem a bit unconventional: They're kids.

Story Pirates is an organization that pairs actors and comedians with stories written by young students. The results are fantastical productions that celebrate the power of imagination while also empowering kids for a lifetime.


Check out their story:

This group takes stories written by little kids and turns them into into theater. And the results will make you smile.

Posted by Upworthy on Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Story Pirates is based on the belief that literacy and education aren't rooted just in ability, but also in self-expression and imagination.

And the results are real.

Founded in a single Harlem elementary school in 2004, Story Pirates has since traveled to schools across the United States to bring kids' stories to life on stage.

All images via Story Pirates/Cricket.

"Over and over again, we'll be in a classroom and teachers will come up to us and be like, 'Wow, this kid is often one of our most reluctant writers,'" executive producer Sam Reiff-Pasarew says. "But in the world of Story Pirates, where we sort of encourage them to use their imagination and be creative, it frees up some of those reluctant writers to become really enthusiastic writers."

This kids-first ethos is even rooted in the name Story Pirates itself.

"With Story Pirates, we wanted a name that sounded awesome to kids," CEO Benjamin Salka says. "We wanted it to be kids-centric. We wanted kids to hear the name Story Pirates and feel like rock stars were coming into their classrooms, not teachers."

And Story Pirates' productions feel a lot different from your typical school talent show.

That's because the organization connects schools with big-city producers, creatives, and improvisors who know how to put on a professional-level performance.  

And when the kids see their own words brought to life with big, thoughtful productions? That's when the magic happens.

"I'm so thrilled that I'm with them," says Amber Castillo, a young writer who participated in the program. "I felt, like, really positive for myself and my story."

Beyond encouraging students to write, it helps them understand that the things they produce are worthy, exciting, and unique.

"In addition to just being a celebration, it's really a validation of them," Kasru says. "The idea that these talented professional actors are, like, taking their work and treating it like it's an amazing theatrical text that we can make great art out of."

Anyone can relate to wishing to be understood and accepted when they're a kid. Story Pirates taps into that idea, specializing in giving kids the validation and confidence they deserve while also embracing a love of writing and learning.

"Story Pirates treats kids as creative peers," artistic director Lee Overtree says. "And I think everyone secretly remembers a little bit of what it’s like to be a kid and be in the world as a kid."

If you wish you had a program like this when you were a kid, check out the Story Pirates' donation page to get them into more schools or get your kid involved by submitting their own story.

Correction 6/26/2017: Sam's last name, Reiff-Pasarew, was incorrectly stated as Kasru.

More

When you ask kids vs. parents about the future, the difference is important.

If you believe the world is only getting worse, this one's for you.

True
TOMS One for One

What does your future look like?

In the wake of recent tragedy, it's easy to feel hopeless. Sometimes, it seems as though the world is meant only for bad things to happen.

That's what it seemed when a couple of filmmakers asked a bunch of grown-ups what the future looked like to them.


All GIFs via "Ainda dá Tempo"/Vimeo.

But what does the future look like to kids?

When the filmmakers asked their kids a similar question — about what their future looks like — their visions were starkly different and full of possibility.

From creative passions...

...to making the world a better place...

...to just having a rad time.

The effect of their optimism on their parents? Inspiring!

Love the emphasis on good care. <3

Happy tears!

Heck yes you do — they are awesome!

Because really, our future is for them, isn't it?

These kids remind us why we need to make the world a better place. And there is still time!

Sometimes it just takes young voices to remind us where our priorities should be: to make the kind of globally connected and empathetic world that our kids deserve and demand.

So, what does our future really look like?

There's a lot of speculation, but there's also a lot of hope — and a lot of world leaders, organizations, celebrities, and everyday folks who are actually trying to make it happen.

You may have recently heard about the Global Goals. Back in September, nearly 200 world leaders committed to work on three broad goals that could truly make the world a better place: ending poverty, fighting inequality, and fixing climate change.

This December, the world is uniting again at COP21 in Paris to center its attention on that third goal of fixing our warming planet — a goal that actually is 100% achievable.

These may seem huge, but looking into the faces of what's at stake — this ambitious and energetic and wonderful next generation — can revitalize us to unify our voices and work together toward real change. It's happening!

Need a pick-me-up? Listen to their hopeful voices. :)

Feel the feels here:

Can you think of someone who needs this kind of encouragement? Pass it on. :)

Scientists have found a way to transform light from stars into sound — then they use the sound to understand them.

The sounds range from something like the sizzle of bacon to that uncomfortable noise that happens when you mistakenly switch to AM radio.

But the coolest part is what they can tell us about the stars themselves. Listen here; it's oddly soothing:


What the heck?

Yeah, I know. From what I can tell, it's the frequency of flickering starlight detected by the mighty Kepler telescope that is transformed into sound.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Dr. Bill Chaplin, an asteroseismologist (or star scientist, roughly) at Birmingham University, explains it for us normals by way of musical metaphor:

"Essentially stars resonate like a huge musical instrument. Stars make sounds naturally but we can't hear this as it is has to travel through space.

Like a musical instrument, stars are not uniformly solid all the way to their core, so the sound gets trapped inside the outer layers and oscillates around inside.

This makes the star vibrate causing it to expand and contract. We can detect this visually because the star gets brighter and dimmer and so we can reconstruct the sounds produced from these vibrations."



Turns out these vibrations can tell us some stuff about stars, like their size.

Stars come in all sorts of sizes, but let's talk about the "sounds" of three common ones and how they relate.

A dwarf star is a star that's roughly the size of our sun.

(I'll just let that sink in a bit, there, as you digest that in comparison to the other star sizes above.)

Anyway, dwarf stars spin faster than large stars because they are smaller. When light from these stars are turned into sound, the lack of "hiss" means the surface area is very small (thus, very little granulation). But because it spins so fast, the sunspots will make the light more irregular — meaning the tone is inconsistent. Go to 1:10 in the video to see what I mean; you can very easily identify how the low tone changes gradually.


Following this pattern, larger sized sub-giants have less of that irregular sunspot flickering because they spin at a slower rate. So the tone is less all over the place, but they have more of that hiss because they're bigger. You can hear this at 1:28 in the video.


Big, ol' red giants are crazy loud because they have tons of granulation and spin very slowly. This results in the maddening static sound you can hear at 1:45.

The coolest part? These sounds also give us insights into other worlds! (Maybe.)

For the brightest stars, our space buddy Kepler can detect when planets cross over the stars based on how the light is disrupted. And the measurements can be very, very accurate — which can give us some hints toward exploring planets that may support habitable life.

So there you have it: how star music helps us understand our universe. Science is rad!

More

A woman who's 'wobbly' talks about why the idea of 'normal' is actually pretty toxic.

"Accepting yourself as you are is an act of civil disobedience." Whoa.

What even is "normal"?

We're constantly shown pictures of what "normal" is through media, but is that accurate? And more importantly, is it helping us ... at all?

Francesca Martinez has cerebral palsy (although she prefers the term "wobbly," which you'll hear in the video below). Feelings of being "abnormal" or "faulty" seeped into her everyday life and drained her of creative energy.


If the world treats you like a mistake or an exception, how can you find your value?

But then she had a realization: Who really is normal, anyway?! Reality is completely warped on every kind of media platform imaginable. Everyone is told to push toward ideals that are often impossible, unhealthy, or unappealing. Who needs that!

She thought about how this pretend idea of "normalcy" relates to our everyday life. We're not made out of cookie cutters, but we're often treated that way, especially by the products we buy.

Think about our shopping carts, our TV screens, our status updates — how much of it has to do with creating a fictional version of our own individual reality? Could the idea of "normal" be something that's actually working against us?

Could "normal" actually be a distraction from the stuff that really matters?

Listen to Francesca's excellent speech on how it relates to the way we buy stuff, how it's affecting climate change (?!), and how accepting ourselves as we are is actually one of the most important things you can do. Like for real.

I just have to quote the last bit of her speech because it is wonderful:

"We won the lottery in life and life is such a beautiful, precious gift, and we have to savor it, because as far as we know, we are the only living things in the universe, so it is our duty to protect it." — Francesca Martinez

Share if you agree with this beautiful perspective!