How Indie Theaters Are Reimagining The Moviegoing Experience

Undergoing surgery is a stress-inducing prospect for anyone, but children are especially vulnerable to anxiety prior to operations. To avoid using risky anti-anxiety medications on young patients, two anesthesiologists at the Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford have developed creative techniques to distract children from their forthcoming surgeries. They use toys and a unique low-cost video projection system called BERT-Bedside Entertainment Theater.

Using audio descriptions of a movie’s action, the XL Cinema app increases the accessibility of movies to a vision impaired audience. The free app has been used thousands of times and production studios are interested in working with XL Cinema to expand its offerings.

Dance, karate, and music instructors in Staten Island, New York are adapting and shifting the ways they deliver lessons to work within the virtual landscape their students, and the rest of society are living in due to the pandemic. Some of the new ways these instructors have approached lesson delivery include using Google Classroom, developing a new music-specific learning platform, and incorporating new classes normally not offered.

Freed from prison after serving at least 15 years, often much longer, for crimes committed when they were teens, a group of men holds twice-monthly Zoom meetings to lend structure and peer support to their lives during a time when COVID-19 restrictions foreclose other face-to-face meetings. Under Washington, D.C.’s Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, 42 men have been released. At least 22 of them meet regularly to share leads on possible jobs, discuss their frustrations, and encourage each other to stay focused on the positive.

The National Education Association has launched a school-focused COVID-19 case tracker in the U.S., all thank to the efforts of a Kansas theater teacher. Alisha Morris started with an excel sheet and took to online searches to start logging the number of positive cases, first around her state, and later was tracking 48 U.S. states. By the time she handed off the data to the NEA, Morris, along with various volunteers "had logged over nearly 4,300 cases at more than 1,000 schools."

In order to bridge the digital divide one school district in Virginia is putting Wi-Fi routers on its school buses. They call them Smart Buses. They buses drive out to neighborhoods where students don't have access to fast, reliable internet. “Four of the Smart Buses go out every day. Each can serve about 40 students, covering about three-quarters of the need in the district.”

Around 20% of high school students in rural Moulton Independent School District in Texas don't have the vital internet connection they need to complete their assignments. Students at Shiner Independent School District, also a rural area school, faced similar issues. Both districts teamed up with Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative, a non-profit utility company, which distributed 20 unlimited data hotspots to Moulton at a $40 monthly cost, as opposed to $200+ cost. Along with individual mobile hotspots, GVEC also turned the Shiner school parking lot into a larger hotspot.

Singapore's aggressive pandemic response in conjunction with strict university rules has helped keep campuses free of COVID-19 cases so far. As a country, free testing and medical care has ensured that positive cases can be isolated quickly, while at the university level, the use of technology, zoning rules, and penalties for those who do not comply have worked to safeguard public health.

In Battle Creek, Michigan, a church has turned to holding online Sunday service during the pandemic, and in doing so, has gained a larger congregation. While there are limitations to attending online services, and some don't feel like "Internet-based connections" are real, around 200 people still attend each online service, including some individuals from overseas.

Bronx shelters have teamed up with industry professionals to put together an after-school program offering students an opportunity to receive mentorship. In the program, which is based around video game-themed writing workshops, students are able to practice their writing skills, while being able to manage pandemic-induced isolation by connecting with other students and instructors.