Texas Mathematics Teacher Spring/Summer 2021 - 15

TEKS and Toons: How Modern Cartoons Align With the TEKS
Rusty Rivets
The next cartoon analysis I will share is on Rusty Rivets.
Rusty Rivets claims to teach about the engineering process.
Teach Engineering (https://www.teachengineering.org)
describes the engineering design process as using the

following steps illustrated in Figure 1, which can be
repeated as many times as necessary in whatever order is
necessary.

Figure 1: Engineering Design Process
Note. The source of this material is the TeachEngineering digital library collection at www.TeachEngineering.org. All rights
reserved. https://www.teachengineering.org/design/designprocess (TeachEngineering, n.d.)
I analyzed Season 2 episode 21a titled " Rusty's Bubble
Trouble " (Sinclair & Brown, 2019). This episode has a
running time of 12 minutes. In this episode, the characters Rusty and Ruby have a problem when one of their
super-bubbles captures their robot dog and Rusty's mom,
and they fly away. The problem they try to solve in this
episode is to pop the super-bubble freeing Rusty's mom
and the robot dog. First, the characters try to pop the
super-bubble with their fingers, which are not strong
enough. Then they decide to try and pop the super-bubble
with a robot arm. They modify their robot claw arm to
have a hand to try and pop the super-bubble. This does
not work and the super-bubble with the robot and mom
fly away. Rusty and Ruby design and build a hovercraft
with a fan attached to catch the super-bubble. The supper-bubble splits into two, one with the robot dog and one
with Rusty's mom. Rusty uses the fan in reverse to hold
the super-bubbles in place and take them back to their
yard to figure how to pop the super-bubbles. An accident causes the fan to reverse and the super-bubbles fly
high into the sky. Rusty and Ruby approach the problem
by making their robot tiger into a flying robot tiger by
combining and designing their robot tiger with a jetpack
and extra-long robot claws to pop the super-bubbles.
The character Rusty even tells the audience " we have
our plan. " They build the flying robot tiger to catch the
super-bubbles and pop them. This episode, which is typical of the entire series, shows the characters identifying
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a problem, researching the problem, developing a plan,
creating a solution to the problem, testing their prototype
then redesigning. This follows the engineering process as
illustrated in Figure 1. There was very little direct math
content in this episode, but the characters are seen counting 56, 57, 58, and 59, which follows TEKS 111.2.b.5 (K).
In this episode of Rusty Rivets, no questions were asked
directly to the audience. It is not interactive in this manner
like other shows I analyzed.
Blue's Clues
The next cartoon analysis I will share on is Blue's Clues.
In this show, a human character tries to solve a question
from the dog Blue, by finding clues indicated with paw
prints. These clues are called Blue's clues. In reference
to Blue's Clues, Anderson et al. (2000) said " Drawing
on the research inspired by Sesame Street, the program
was broadly designed to teach thinking skills " (p. 84). I
analyzed Season 2 episode 4 titled " Math! " (Santomero &
Silverman, 1997). This episode has a running time of 21
minutes. In this episode, there were many math concepts
introduced. This show also asks questions of the audience
and waits for the audience to answer. This episode asked
the audience 29 questions and waited an average of 1.8
seconds for an answer before answering the question on
the show. Table 3 lists the math concepts I observed in this
episode and the related TEKS.
Spring/Summer 2021

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https://www.teachengineering.org http://www.TeachEngineering.org https://www.teachengineering.org/design/designprocess https://www.tctmonline.org/

Texas Mathematics Teacher Spring/Summer 2021

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