Still Curious

“You don’t need a lab coat”: transforming chemistry education through imagination and play - Colleen Kelley | S3E5

• Dr Colleen Kelley • Season 3 • Episode 5

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 1:16:16

Dr Colleen Kelley is a chemist and the creator and founder of Kids’ Chemical Solutions, a comic-book based chemistry curriculum that aims to transform chemistry education through imagination and play. We discuss Colleen's mission to make chemistry more accessible and enjoyable for everyone.

Key Topics

  • How Colleen is making chemistry more accessible and enjoyable for everyone, regardless of perceived math abilities, and the importance of trust and curiosity in unlocking imagination and real learning
  • Why fear is the number one barrier to learning chemistry, and the importance of understanding chemistry to preserve our world
  • How Kids' Chemical Solutions connects chemical concepts to everyday life and allows students to solve mysteries using chemistry
  • How being a grokkist following her joy with no plan led to Colleen’s squiggly career path and her creation of Kids' Chemical Solutions

Full Show Notes
Visit the Grokkist podcast hub for a full digest of this episode including highlights and links to stuff we discussed: https://grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast/s3e5-colleen-kelly/

Recorded 2 March 2023

Website: grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast | Email: podcast@grokk.ist | Socials: @grokkist
Music: Kleptotonic Swing by Tri-Tachyon

Colleen Kelley

everyone can learn chemistry this mythology. That surrounds it, that it's heavily based in math and that it's hard. Everyone gets brainwashed by that. And, you know, I'm calling bollocks on all of that. You can be successful with very little math. I have not had math since 1985 and I'm still going. It's one of those things when, everyone says, like in Finding Nemo, don't swim over there. It's dangerous. So everyone believes it. and It's been like that for over a hundred years in our education system. Everyone should learn chemistry. And the reason is so that we can preserve our world. I had a comment from an educator saying, well, these comic books are cute, but they're not going to change anything. And I'm like, oh, I felt like said, hold my beer, change everything.

Danu Poyner

You're listening to the still curious podcast with me, Daniel pointer. My guest today is Dr. Colleen Kelly, who is a chemist and the creator and founder of kids, chemical solutions, a comic book based chemistry curriculum that aims to transform chemistry education through imagination and play. In the ground, you just heard Coleen's passion and ambition for chemistry comes through loud and clear. But chemistry, wasn't her plan. A and in fact, there was never really a plan at all.

Colleen Kelley

I don't remember ever having a plan. I just kept doing what I thought was fun. It scared my parents. They kept wondering when I was going to get a job and they still ask me that. They're still wondering when I'm gonna get a job.

Danu Poyner

Colleen is a first-generation college student. Her squiggly career began in the U S army who paid for her college tuition. She was put in a department that studied tropical diseases, which she found fascinating, despite having no background in biology. After her time in the army, in which Coleen says she was the worst soldier ever, who couldn't find her way out of a shoe box. She went on to study malaria and tropical diseases. She fell in love with the world of discovery and research and wanted to continue to explore more chemistry. So she headed to Penn state university and dashed through graduate school, receiving her PhD in chemistry. At the age of 24. It was during this time that she had her first taste of teaching. A night class in medical chemistry for physicians who needed continuing medical education. She then decided to pursue a teaching and research career as an academic accepting a Chateaux by, on postdoctoral fellowship in Strasburg, France. With Nobel prize winners, Jeanmarie lane. And eventually taking a position as a chemistry professor at the university of Arizona. At the university, Colleen loved being an educator, but chafed against traditional ways of teaching chemistry, which you found frustratingly inaccessible and exclusive for students. Coleen has many thoughts on why people find chemistry so hard. But there's one reason that stands out most.

Colleen Kelley

Fear. Fear is the number one. When they're afraid of the topic, imagination can't come out of fear. So the first thing I have to do with my class is develop trust and then that trust goes into curiosity. And that curiosity then can go into imagination, and then we can get the real learning done.

Danu Poyner

Coleen found herself on a mission to make chemistry education more accessible and enjoyable for everyone. She co-authored a series of textbooks for students who wanted to become nurses and who was struggling with how to apply what they were learning in chemistry to a nursing career. The textbooks were clinically based and featured fictitious patients in bizarre situations wrapped in a mystery in class Coleen would ask students to solve the mystery. Using the chemistry that she had just taught them. This approach proved to be a big hit with students. And out of this idea would come kids chemical solutions and it's series of comic books in which the characters who represent elements from the periodic table, collaborate to solve Charlie angel style mysteries. While the chemistry comic books connected with students themselves, the format proved to be something of a head-scratcher for publishers and purchases. And for a long time, Colleen struggled to gain traction and making them commercially viable.

Colleen Kelley

I had given up a couple times because of the fear of not financially being able to support this project without making any income off of it. And the fear of it just being one more grokkist thing that I did and spent thousands of dollars on what went nowhere. I really just have to think about the lives that can be changed if I continue on. So you take yourself out of it and it's kind of like, you find the strength to lift the car up even though you're afraid. It has that urgency for me, and I've not felt that much urgency about anything really.

Danu Poyner

I was already intrigued by Coleen's take on chemistry before our conversation. But I left with an even greater respect and admiration for the care, depth and thoughtfulness of her approach and what she's doing with kids, chemicals solutions. It's an entertaining, inspiring and refreshing lead down to earth discussion. In which we also discussed the time Colin invented both a sports drink and a new kind of perfume and what it's like to have a son who is also a Grokker. It's Callie and Kelly coming up after the music on today's episode. Of the still curious podcast. Hi Colleen. Welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Colleen Kelley

I am great. How are you doing?

Danu Poyner

I'm doing really well. Thank you. I've got lots to ask you. So you are a chemistry PhD with 30 years experience in higher education, and currently a chemistry instructor at the University of Arizona. You've published a number of chemistry textbooks, presented at South by Southwest EDU and Chemistry Education, Research and Practice, and you're also the founder of Kids Chemical Solutions, where you create case studies of chemistry mysteries in a comic book format, which are designed to enrich young people's understanding of chemical concepts and connect those concepts to everyday life. For those who maybe don't understand a lot about the world of chemistry, what would you say is the most important thing for someone to understand about what you do?

Colleen Kelley

I want them to understand that they can do it. That the periodic table is just like a map and you can unfold all kinds of riches and all kinds of things to discover under there. It's accessible to everyone. And I don't know. I always hear it's only for smart people. I don't know what that means. I think we're all brilliant. So, it's ripe and ready for everybody and I think if we open our minds enough, we can really enjoy what's in that world.

Danu Poyner

Yeah, I'm really struck by the enthusiasm when you talk about chemistry and the language that you use to talk about it and the beauty of it. When I think of chemistry, the image that comes to mind, as a bit of a n00b is people in white lab coats doing things with colored test tubes. But the way that you talk about that seems a very long way from that. You talk about it as an imaginative world that I can enter into. So I'm curious, what does chemistry look like to you?

Colleen Kelley

It does look like that imaginative world. I do remember the first time my parents came to my research lab when I was a graduate student at Penn State University, and they were shocked to see how messy and dirty and gross it was. I think they were thinking they were gonna see the white lab coats and the nicely colored things, but there's crud everywhere and we're scraping things, trying to get that last little bit of, I don't know, green goo. And we all have our Penn State sweatshirts on that have holes in them and there's loud heavy metal music playing in the background and we're just jamming out. So it's nothing like the movies and it's so much more fun. On the exterior, that's what it looks like to me. Inside my brain, it's like a great animated series. I think everybody now is aware of the animated series Bluey and how bluey just kind of sucks you in. And when you enter the world of molecules, you see those stories enveloping and there's things to figure out in puzzles and, you know, molecules have characteristics and they could be like bluey or they could be like bingo. And they have predictive properties. So it really is a great, fun world to enter into. But you need the tools to learn how to do that.

Danu Poyner

And of course, the tools for how to do that is very much what you are looking at through Kids' Chemical Solution as I understand it. On the podcast I like to get a little bit beyond the CV and explore the human side of the squiggly career journeys that we take when we follow our curiosity and live life as grokkists and the red thread that connects our various experiences. I understand, Colleen, you've spent time as a US Army officer, you've studied malaria and tropical diseases, you've invented a sports drink, and you have a patent initiative in perfume. Where should we start? That's an incredible arrange of things.

Colleen Kelley

I know, I guess we'll follow the red thread. There is some cohesion to those disparate endeavors, for sure. Most of the cohesion is me just following it along and saying yes in life. A little bit like Winnie the Poo. I joined the Army because I needed a way to pay for university. I'm a first generation college student, and someone told me at 17 that they'll pay everything and then actually pay me a monthly stipend to go to college. And I said, well, that sounds good. And that's all I knew. So I really just wanted to go to college. That's all I wanted to do because I liked learning. And I was curious. So when I got to the Army, they made use of my skills as a chemist, and they put me in a department that studied tropical diseases and Danu, it's something I knew nothing about. I took one semester of biology and summer school. Like, I probably couldn't have pointed out a mosquito actually, if you wanted me to at the time. So I was in way over my head, but that's where they put me and you don't have a choice. And, talk about being thrown into the deep end of the pool. And then I read the statistics and I'm such a humanitarian and I learned about all the kids under the age of five that at the time, and I think it's still the number one reason children die worldwide is malaria. Then I realized we had labs in Thailand, in Brazil, and in the Middle East and in Nigeria as well. All of these international hotspots for malaria. So I bought into the disease and then knew I could use my skillset to try to help.

Danu Poyner

So, you already had chemistry skills at that point, was chemistry always plan A for you?

Colleen Kelley

I don't remember ever having a plan. So, so people say plan A or plan B. I tried to reflect on my childhood and at this point in my life and having these great conversations with people like you, it's really fun to reflect and I just kept reading and enjoying school and there was just, a follow my joy with no plan. I do remember though, it scared my parents. They kept wondering when I was going to get a job and they still ask me that. They're still wondering when I'm gonna get a job. So when you come from a family where they had a job and you kept that job, that same job. My mom worked in a nursing home and took care of elderly and my dad sold insurance. That's a job. And you're with a company or with somebody and all the stuff I was doing, they just shrugged their shoulders. I guess I just never really had a plan. I just kept doing what I thought was fun.

Danu Poyner

Yeah, it was a trick question, cause I think I've only ever had one person on here who's actually said they had a plan A of some. Mostly we just kind of follow.

Colleen Kelley

grokkists unite!

Danu Poyner

Exactly. Well, I mean, I should ask you about the term grokkist, because Obviously I'm talking to people I would consider to be grokkists, by which I mean people who moved through life following their interests and curiosity, constantly learning new things. That's kind of as a way of being with a sense of care and wonder and sometimes don't fit the institutional mold as a result. And sometimes end up looking a bit iffy on paper as a result of following the joy. So I was curious, does this idea of being a grokkist resonate with you and how so, if so?

Colleen Kelley

It does resonate with me and, now that I've learned about it, you're the first person that I heard it from, and it makes me feel like I'm okay, there's other people like me. I think the first time I heard anyone talk about our way of being, was Elizabeth Gilbert. She was talking about hummingbirds and her partner at the time, I think Raya, she was describing as a hummingbird and a hummingbird is a grokkist, and why the world needs more hummingbirds. And I sunk my teeth into that so strongly and thought, well, if Elizabeth Gilbert says it's okay, it's okay, And she said, the world needs more of us. So I thought, well, then that's okay too. But up until then it's been this, what is wrong with me kind of thing when you're, keep flitting from one thing to the next but now I think it's okay.

Danu Poyner

That's good. And hopefully the parents think it's okay as well.

Colleen Kelley

Yeah. I did have a child. I'm a mom, so that's the one thing that they can say is like, normal about me,

Danu Poyner

I'm curious, just to spend a little bit longer here, what did following the joy with no plan look like for you when you were growing up and how did you discover chemistry, I guess is what I'm curious about?

Colleen Kelley

I did wanna go to college because I was curious about what happens there. And I was just studying in high school everything and doing well. I'd love to read as a child, and I fell into a high school chemistry class with a teacher who was just animated and fun and funny. He liked the Grateful Dead. I thought that was really cool. So he was relatable and, as quiet as I was, he would talk to me and notice how I was devouring the material and really just kind of invite me to do other supplemental problems or ask me if I wanted to go to the board, and just kind of bring it out of me because he was witnessing someone really enjoying it.

Danu Poyner

That's the power of a good teacher, isn't it, to draw that out of you. And of course, you are an educator yourself, so you will know all about that.

Colleen Kelley

Yeah.

Danu Poyner

So you went to college as you say. You joined the army cuz they were going to pay for the college for you, and that seemed like a good deal. How did you find that environment? Was that compatible with the way that you were liking to go about things?

Colleen Kelley

No, the Army was terrifying. I think I was the worst soldier ever. There's the one thing that you need to do is you need to take a compass and a map at the time, this is before gps, and a very sharp pencil. And try to find your way through, like a course where you're trying to find different little hidden widgets in the woods. I could never. They just shook their head. I think it's because I live so much in my brain. I don't really look around very much. I was just wondering around the woods and without any kind of direction, and could never pass that part of being in the army. The thing I did like, I had never done running before and we ran, well it was mandatory and I really started to enjoy running. So that was something I brought with me from that experience. The one thing is they knew I had really great grades and that I had expertise in an area that they needed. I got a lot of passes because I was so smart and again, I don't even know what that means, but in their eyes they're like, okay, well, she's a female scientist. We really need her. So if she can't find her way out of a shoebox, that's okay. After I finished up that, you have a mandatory period to serve after they pay for your school. So, I decided to become a professor at that time. I was able to work in Brazil for almost a year and I used that international experience to look at other global problems that could be solved as part of my research. So when I first took my position as a professor, part of my area of research was looking at how water gets contaminated by heavy metals. And how we can clean that up naturally with different plants and things like that. It was definitely that global exposure and exposure to solving problems in third world countries primarily, that led me to my next step.

Danu Poyner

Was there a moment when you decided that being a professor was the direction to go, or did it just creep up on you and emerge as the natural next step?

Colleen Kelley

Yeah, I think, um, when I was in graduate school, and I think it's still prevalent today from what I observe, faculty really love what they're doing and really mentor their students to follow in their footsteps. There is that kind of like, go learn a lot, go do different national labs, do what I did and learn about malaria. Go work on your craft and then take that knowledge and bring it into the classroom. While I was working on the malaria, it was in Washington DC so I had the opportunity to teach a night class to physicians who needed continuing medical education. And that was my first time teaching. And, it was at the National Institutes of Health. They have night classes for area physicians as part of a program. I taught a course in what's called medicinal chemistry and I really enjoyed teaching and that got me started. I thought, okay, the next step should be academic, where I can teach and do research.

Danu Poyner

Was there a particular program of research that you were interested in pursuing? You suggested it's around water contamination and those kinds of problems, but how are you thinking about that?

Colleen Kelley

It was a grokkist moment. I think I was reading some articles about these plants that could use heavy metals as nutrients and then you can harvest the plants. The plants are contaminated, but the heavy metals are then all in one area instead of spread out and invisible so you know where they are. And it's such a inexpensive way, again, for third world countries. There's a floating plant called the water hyacinth that's really a noxious weed in most of the world. And it's roots look like my hair actually. They're hairy roots and they have so much surface area and they're sticky. And so metals like mercury or cadmium or arsenics, things that are poisonous stick to their roots. And so you can use them as sponges in these contaminated areas. And in fact, in the contaminated wells in Bangladesh that were contaminated with arsenic, they used, roots from water hyacinth to soak it up. I read some articles and I thought, well, I wonder how this is happening. I knew that it worked, but again, I want to go into my invisible story in my mind, and I wanted to see the characters at play and what's happening on those roots. What are the metals stuck to? What's going on in the roots of the plant? So I really like to go into that invisible world and see what's happening and how it's happening.

Danu Poyner

Yeah. That's really interesting, Colleen, the way that you talk about how you are engaging with the invisible world, and you see characters, I wonder if you could help us step into that invisible world for a moment. What do you see? How does, what does

Colleen Kelley

the water hyacinth roots, they're really hairy and gross. If you've ever swam into them or been around them, you know they get tangled up and everything. So I wanted to see, you know, are there little baby tweezers on the surface of those roots that are like tweezing up metals? And if there are tweezers, what are the atoms that are part of that tweezer network that allows metals to be sucked up? Or maybe it's not a tweezer, maybe it's more like Velcro, a full surface. So the tweezer would be like specificity where you're picking up one at a time, and Velcro would be more sponge-like. Or is it like a frog's tongue that comes out from the roots and grabs the metal and then pulls it back in? Like a frog grabs a fly. So there's a lot of different ways that could have happened and we wanted to figure out how that's happening.

Danu Poyner

Yeah, that's super interesting. The kind of personification of what's going on in that world and seeing things as characters is really fascinating to me. And not the way I've ever heard anyone talk about these things before. I wonder what's that like for you when other people experience you talk about the world that way? Does that bring people along or do people find it a bit odd

Colleen Kelley

people along. My students love it. I will tell them stories just like I told you that story and then we get into it and they just love it. There is A characteristic of a molecule that does kind of act like a frog's tongue and grabs an electron or two electrons and grabs it back. And when I do that in front of them, they're like, oh, so that's what makes it a base. And I'm like, yeah, that's how it works. We need more of that in the classroom because otherwise it's really just dry facts.

Danu Poyner

So I can see you accumulating possibilities. You've got chemistry and then you added in the tropical diseases, and then the international experience gave you a way of problematizing something that needed doing. And then you had the teaching experience with the physicians, and then that presented an opportunity. What happened then? What was the opportunity that came up that allowed you to move into the professor position?

Colleen Kelley

I put job applications out, literally all over the world, and someone said yes. So really that was it? It was just the availability of a position in Arizona to get started.

Danu Poyner

So how was that environment for you? Was that compatible?

Colleen Kelley

Yeah, very much so. I didn't know what I was doing. I had never taught classes as large as 200, 300 students before. I had only taught physicians at this point, and at that time they were students that were older than I was. So it was also very different teaching college aged students. And really just seeing the diversity and the different backgrounds and the different levels of preparedness. So there was all kinds of curiosities in this new world.

Danu Poyner

Where do you typically start with college age students with chemistry? Do you build on what they have brought with them or is there some unlearning and starting again that needs to happen?

Colleen Kelley

The two ways that you suggest we should be doing, but we're not. We just start on page one of the textbook and hope everyone can hang on.

Danu Poyner

So, speaking of textbooks, you've produced a number of chemistry textbooks. How do you go about that? What's that process been like, in imagining what they need to be and what they include?

Colleen Kelley

They were my precursors to the comic books. The first one that I wrote, I co-authored with my friend Wendy, who was also at the university. And these were case studies for students who wanted to become nurses. And we were realizing they were struggling with a lot of the application of what we were teaching them and how would this apply to a nursing career. So we decided to make up a bunch of fictitious patients and put them in bizarre situations and create a mystery around that, and then ask them to solve the mystery using the chemistry that we had just taught them, but they were clinically based, meaning that, you know, a two-year-old child is crying and comes in with a tooth abscess and they have to figure out what course of antibiotics to put them on. So it's really relevant to pharmaceutical sciences. Things that would be in the pharmacy and understanding how medications work and contraindications and things like that. My textbooks have all arrived out of necessity as a platform. Students hold onto a textbook, much like babies hold onto a blanket. It becomes something that they put close to them. Putting something in a textbook elevates the significance of that material in the course. So if it's in a textbook or now in some kind of ebook, it then becomes like, okay, this is for real.

Danu Poyner

So there's some stakes involved in how it's scoped and presented. Uh, it sounds like the idea of problem solving mysteries was present quite early on. Was there a, moment that you had that idea or you always gonna do that? Or did it emerge through starting with a different type of design and then changing your mind?

Colleen Kelley

A lot of times when chemists listen to the news or read the newspaper, you come across stories where the science is not presented all that accurately, and we would bring those articles into class and say, what's not quite right with this. And And from there we realized we could write our own kind of bad stories and ask them what's wrong with it, as opposed to constantly relying on the news.

Danu Poyner

Let's talk about the comic book series and how that came about. You've got four published textbooks. Where did the idea for the comic book series come from?

Colleen Kelley

It came from looking at chemistry, like you said, where do you start? And I said, page one of the traditional textbook. In most colleges and universities, a student who's taking one semester, roughly 15 weeks of chemistry, will cover 10 chapters worth of material from any given textbook. And they're all about the same. They might have different covers, but that's about it. So I just took those 10 chapters and thought, well, I wonder if I can write a story about each of the concepts in chapters one through 10. So chunk them out like that. So I just started to try to write like a novel almost, where I would insert little puzzles or activities or textbook kind of problems in there and then keep writing the story. So the idea started with that, where I was writing the stories. I never really thought of a comic book because I'm not an artist. When I wrote the stories, I thought they were great. of course you do and I thought anyone's gonna want these, these are fantastic. And no one wanted them.

Danu Poyner

Oh, no one wanted, what were the stories? Can you give me a couple of examples?

Colleen Kelley

They're just like the comic books, but they were written in paragraph form and I was not communicating my vision or I'm not sure what was happening. The third comic book, it's a parody on the Princess Bride. And the story was along that lines too, but I was not reaching any kind of audience that wanted to publish it. I had my own students read them and work through them, and my own students love 'em. But it's really the adults who need to make money off of it saw no value in them whatsoever.

Danu Poyner

Yeah. That's quite a different problem, isn't it? So it's connecting with the people who it's for, but not the people who need to be buying it and distributing it.

Colleen Kelley

Yeah. Yeah.

Danu Poyner

And just to set the scene a little bit here, we should explain what the comic book series is and how it's set up.

Colleen Kelley

Yeah, I'll go back to the original inspiration because that's still the description of the comic books. There are 10 comic books in the series, so imagine if you were reading a series, in the United States we have the Magic Treehouse, in the old days we had Nancy Drew, but it's a continuum. Everyone knows what a series is now because of Netflix, where it's one episode after another. And they were designed to be a continuum where the characters would maintain their essence, but also grow and change in interesting ways, but there would be some predictability and some connection with these characters. But in the first comic book, it's about the material covered in chapter one of a chemistry textbook. And then the second one is chapter two. So the learning is scaffolded in such a way that if you read them in sequence, you're going to learn one semester of college chemistry.

Danu Poyner

So you've got a story arc and a character arc like a TV show would but it's scripted along the same track as the chemistry curriculum for a semester.

Colleen Kelley

Yes, exactly. Yes.

Danu Poyner

Yeah. That's really cool. Would you like to tell me about the characters?

Colleen Kelley

The four main characters are Poppy, and she stands for the Element Polonium. So Po Poppy, PO for Polonium, and she has a twin brother who's five minutes older, Ray, and Ray is also radioactive, and Ray is for radium. So Poppy and Ray are both radioactive and that's why they're green. And I don't really explain that. That is revealed as the stories go on, people uncover why they're green and things like that. And then they live with their Granny Eve. I call Poppy Intelligent and she's book smart, and she likes to have a plan and she is very anxious if things don't go according to plan. And Ray has intuition he relies on. And what I'm trying to model for teachers or parents, is that Ray solves as many problems, if not more, through his intuition as Poppy does through her fact finding and intellect. And what I wanna use them both for is a model of different types of ways of knowing the world. Ray has big puffy hair and you never see his eyes. His hair is really puffy and it's always like right down to his nose. And it's really modeled after my son because that's how my son's hair looks like, but I love the fact that never do you see Ray's eyes because he doesn't need to see things. He feels things. So he has that type of way about going through the world and he is observant without having to see. Whereas Poppy is very much wanting to see and read, and she's clenching the periodic table at all times. But they play off of each other and are able to solve the mystery together. So there's that social emotional learning part about collaboration and what that looks like. And then their Granny Eve seems like a typical grandma. She's also green, but she is a secret chemist and she is this world renowned chemist that nobody knows about. And she's in the kitchen. She uses the kitchen as her laboratory. But when the kids come in, she quickly puts everything away and looks like she's making cookies instead. And then she has this secret friend that she talks to, this old 1930s radio, and the radio's name is MC, and you later learn that the radio is Marie Curie's voice coming through, talking to Eve and telling Eve about different tragedies that are happening that the kids have to go solve. So in the 1970s, there was a series called Charlie's Angels. It's much set up like that where MC gives the message to Eve and then Eve tells the children. Poppy and Ray can never hear MC. They just think granny's loony cuz she talks to a radio and they're like, Gran, are you losing it? Like, why do you talk to your radio?

Danu Poyner

Right. I really like how layered and nuanced the work is that you're doing with the comic books. The characters are kind of reflective of the elements that they represent. And you have also got the different ways of experiencing the world, as you've suggested. There's a lot of stuff for people to discover in there about why things are the way they are in this world and the connections between the characters and there's meanings to discover. What strikes me about this is it's playful and cartoony looking, but you're not dumbing down the material or shying away from the complexity, and you are not doing that thing that a lot of well-intentioned educational stuff does, where you trick people into learning by making it fun and the idea that you have to distract people with shiny things to learn something. This is much more about saying chemistry is in itself so inherently interesting. It's literally the stuff the world is made of. How amazing and interesting is that? So come step into this world and let's explore it together. That's a really powerful place to start from, and it's maybe not what it looks like on the surface immediately.

Colleen Kelley

Yeah. I am so glad that you observed that. It's somewhat problematic as you can imagine. People ask, you know, what age is this for? Especially schools and people in education and publishers. And I say eight to 108, and that puzzles them because everybody can learn chemistry this way and they're fun stories. What I think is difficult for people is they see the playful characters and they see the comic book and they think, okay, well that's elementary school. And they don't realize it can be useful for university as well. I've tried to pitch it at the university level at a community college actually, and they said, oh, this is too young. And I'm looking at the current curriculum and their current curriculum is actually a little bit less than what's in the comic books. I have the discerning eye and I know what the learning objectives are. I'm finding that these nine year olds are learning just as much as a 70 year old could learn if that person would wanna pick up the comic book and just dive into to learn. It could be something like those language programs like Babble or something like that, like what age group is that for? If you wanna learn French and you don't know French, you can't say, well, this is for 10 year olds, but if you're 50, you have to get the babble for 50 year olds, they don't do that. Or like music, if you wanted to learn how to play the guitar, you could start playing the guitar today and in your class could be 10 year olds and 80 year olds. And that's the way my comic books are set up.

Danu Poyner

On the one hand, you've been very democratic and inviting everyone in to discover this world and being really layered about that. And I'm curious to hear stories of how people are connecting with material. It sounds like it's really opening them up, but on the other hand, the medium itself brings people's assumptions about comics and educational content, and does that create a barrier to what you're trying to accomplish with the medium. What is that like for you?

Colleen Kelley

It's required for me to have conversations with people because I've learned that they may not get it. I had a comment from an educator saying, well, these comic books are cute, but they're not going to change anything. And I'm like, oh, I felt like said, hold my beer, change everything. They're going change science education worldwide by allowing everyone to have access to this understanding of molecules. People embrace Legos and understand the power of them. So I need them to say, okay, well you see Legos as being powerful tools for learning and constructing and all ages. The comic books are in that genre too.

Danu Poyner

I wonder if we can go back a little bit then, and we were talking about the stories and you really liked them and the people you were showing them to really liked them, but they didn't land so well with the publishers. How were you feeling about the project at that time? Were you in the mode of, oh, is this a thing? I'm not sure. Or were you in hold my beer mode, I know this is a thing. When did you become really confident about what you were doing and the path that you were on?

Colleen Kelley

I gave up a ton of times because it was too hard and the endeavor was getting very expensive. The art is very expensive, and I like to pay people for their skillset. Really, I am just eternally grateful, and I can't say this loud enough to Hewitt learning. They're my publishers who heard my vision in five minutes as part of a group that we're in called The Innovation W orld where we have kids from all over the world come to give talks about different inventions. And Kristen, from Hewett Learning was part of that group and heard my pitch and got it. And they were the ones that were able to bring Kids Chemical Solutions to life. We're working actually now on video games and they let me have a lot of fun with coming up with different video games. We have a card game called Ionic Ooze. We have Atomic Bingo, and we're really just having a great time. And they're very skilled in homeschool curriculum. They understand what moms at home, moms and dads, grandmas, whatever, homeschool educators need. So they're helping to guide me and they also understand what's necessary in a classroom. You just need one person, but it's great to have one really good team.

Danu Poyner

Yeah. That's fantastic. Did you wanna share about how that pitch came to be? It sound like there's a lot of troughs and ups and downs that led up to that point.

Colleen Kelley

I had um, someone explain to me that I need to get on LInkedin and I came across Juli Shively who runs this Innovation World. And I love watching science fairs and little kids invent and explain their inventions, and they're like, I made like a spaceship that goes to the moon and eats cookies. I'm like, that's fantastic. Let's make that. Because when they're so young, they make these really fun inventions. So she introduced me to Kristen and said, I think Hewitt Learning might be interested in what you're doing, because they don't have a science curriculum as part of their offerings yet. Which surprised me because Hewitt Learning has been around for 60 some years, so they're not even a new company, but they just didn't have a science offering. And were primarily literature based. And my comic books really help that because my comics are literature based as well. Because it's a lot of reading along with the science.

Danu Poyner

You mentioned the homeschool market and I guess there's an interesting question there because as well as the acceptance from a publisher and a distributor taking on the vision, it's gotta be sold into the system, right? And the standards and the strictures that exist in the education curriculum. What are your thoughts on getting it into that kind of environment?

Colleen Kelley

The homeschool market in the United States has been great in that they have a pain point. They recognize internationally even, that they don't have a real chemistry curriculum. I've interviewed maybe 200 homeschool families about where their pain point is with science, and it's always with chemistry because they buy kits and they don't know what their kids are mixing or they send them to community college for it because they don't know how to teach it at home. It becomes this outlier, it's the problem. Like, now what do we do about chemistry? We've handled literature, we've handled mathematics, we've handled biology. What do we do about chemistry? And it's a tough one to solve. So I think they were ready for my product.

Danu Poyner

Why do you think chemistry is an outlier and a difficult nut to crack in that sense?

Colleen Kelley

That's the age old question. I think that goes back way in time to this lore, mystery mythology. I'll mostly go with mythology that surrounds it, that it's heavily based in math and that it's hard. Everyone gets brainwashed by that. And, you know, I'm calling bollocks on all of that. I have not had math since 1985 and I'm still going. I can still invent something. I have a university class tomorrow. So with pre-med students, it's not based solely in math. There's math that can be used and be helpful. You can be successful with very little math. I think it's one of those things when, everyone says, like in Finding Nemo, don't swim over there. It's dangerous. So everyone believes it. and It's been like that for over a hundred years in our education system. Don't take chemistry. It's hard. Don't take chemistry. You won't get it, you'll fail it. That's the only class I failed. And it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy that I just want to end.

Danu Poyner

Yeah. I'm really energized by the way that you talk about this and the importance of the accessibility and the fearlessness about that. I think it's very inspiring for a lot of people who maybe have had the brainwashing message, as you put it, and maybe haven't thought about it that much. What do you think is really appealing about chemistry as something for someone to learn and maybe pick up as an adult? Why would that be a really good thing for someone to do?

Colleen Kelley

I'll use the analogy of a marathon, right? So I also believe anyone can run a marathon because many of us have two legs and can physically start, but it starts with forming a habit when you're at a certain age. And maybe you run two miles, that's great, and then you run two miles maybe for three years and then work up to three miles, et cetera. Chemistry needs to be taken like that, little bits at a time and keep going, as opposed to what we're doing right now in the United States is we're putting everybody at the start line of a marathon, freshman year of university and say, oh, you haven't been training. That's okay. You'll be fine. And then they find out that it's hard. Well, yeah, a marathon's hard. If you haven't trained, you're not gonna finish. You're going stop. You're going to fail and you're gonna tell everybody that a marathon's so hard. But if you've talked to anyone like myself who's learned how to run, walk, jog, stop, get a drink, talk to your friends, you can get through it and it can be quite enjoyable. I think we just need to change the way we think about learning, that not all subjects can be crammed down your throat and expect to be successful. If we think about the marathon again, we can prepare for that in little chunks and then all of a sudden we've got a lot of people that can get to that finish line.

Danu Poyner

I really like that. And enjoyable chunks too, right? It doesn't have

Colleen Kelley

Yeah.

Danu Poyner

take your medicine. It should be entertaining and wonder inducing. There's a nice video on your website from a TV appearance you did on Arizona Illustrated, where you talk about the process of making the comics and collaborating with the artist you're working with. And what I really like is you can see the kids enjoying the comics and talking about them, and I think it's really nice to see how people engage and hear about that. The TV appearance sounds like another big step in the journey. How was that?

Colleen Kelley

That was great. The producers were from the University of Arizona. The University of Arizona did a news piece on the comics, and so they said This might make an interesting story for Arizona Illustrated. And the um, producers were just so kind and very gentle and, just like talking with you. They were easy to talk with and had really good ideas. They were really creative. It was not stressful, and I'm happy with how it turned out because I don't appear to be anxious or nervous. Because it was a very relaxing environment to talk with when they were interviewing me in the classroom or just observing me work. It was almost like they weren't there. That appearance has changed my life. It changed the impact of Kids' Chemical Solutions. First of all, there's a softness to it. The music is soft in the background. There's soft lighting, everything about it is soft. And I just love that. There's no white lab coats anywhere. There's no equations anywhere. There's twister in a swimming pool and drawing funny seals and things like that. So in that way, I feel like it's almost like the best business card I could have for people to get it. And I think without that video, I would not be where I am today because it's difficult to put a printed piece of material in someone. They're not gonna see what this project is about. It's been really great to have that.

Danu Poyner

I think the lab coat's point is important. The first time I spoke to you, I mentioned something about lab coats and you had a lot to say about. I don't know if I can coax you to say it again, but I enjoyed it very much.

Colleen Kelley

Sure. I, yeah, you could get me started.

Danu Poyner

Yeah. Let's hear it.

Colleen Kelley

I think the the white lab coat and then you put the goggles on, has become this exclusivity club, right? Like, if you are smart enough to wear the lab coat and put the goggles on, you're going to be a scientist. And again, I feel like it's a costume just as much as if I put on Buzz Lightyear's costume, I can't fly. Well, buzz Lightyear can't really fly either, but you guys get what I'm saying. It's a costume and it's a costume that represents exclusivity and academic excellence and inaccessibility because there's danger implied because you have to have safety goggles on. Now you do have to wear safety goggles in the lab. We all wear safety goggles. But I think we need to stop that. And going back to my marathon analogy, I feel like what we're doing, especially on social media, is a huge disservice. In the United States in particular, we're taking lots of pictures of kids that are adorable wearing lab coats and safety goggles, and they've got some slime in front of them. and we're saying, look at all the science we're doing with these kids or chemistry, and I'm saying, there's no chemistry. You put 'em in a costume and gave 'em some slime. They're not gonna pass my class with that. There's no understanding or knowledge, and I think we keep doing that and social media is really doing us a disservice because everyone keeps putting pictures of kids that look like that and saying, maybe it's a group of young girls saying that we're promoting girls in science or girls in stem. Well, you're putting 'em in a costume and that's not going to help. They need to learn fundamentals. And the very first fundamental is a periodic table. And when you read the periodic table, you don't need a lab coat on. You don't need goggles, and you don't need slime. Your imagination is all you need. We really have to back this up from what is image and what is robust, fundamental understanding that leads to inventions like a covid test that could save the world. A covid test is not fancy. You put something up your nose that's disgusting, you don't plug it in. There's nothing fancy about a covid test, but that is robust life-saving chemistry. That's what we need more of. We don't need more people in lab coats and slime and, you know, plugging things in and coding. Coding is good, but not coding for chemistry. Chemists are important for the reason. Just that I said a covid test is a 2020 example of something that just came out of necessity and saved millions of lives.

Danu Poyner

The question I have in follow up then is, given all of your experience in teaching people chemistry and the journey you've seen people go on in learning it, when someone really gets the imaginative side and grasp the ethos and is able to run the chemistry marathon, I guess, what does that picture look like? What kind of qualities do they have?

Colleen Kelley

There are 20 year olds who ask me about going to graduate school, and just continuing their learning. And when you go into a building on a campus where there's students getting their PhDs in chemistries, they'll all have safety glasses on, but they'll have a sweatshirt on that says University of Arizona with a lot of holes in it, because they spilled something on it. Or they might be just looking at, literally their data still comes out on a piece of paper, it's called a nmr, and they're analyzing their NMR on a piece of paper and trying to figure out what is the pattern and they're trying to unravel a pattern. So there's a lot of different ways.

Danu Poyner

really struck by the passion that you talk about the accessibility and the exclusivity. You mentioned you were a first generation college student. Is this particularly important to you because of that experience? And did you experience exclusivity yourself going through that environment?

Colleen Kelley

I never even knew that term, first generation college student, till a year ago. And I was like, oh, wait, that's me. I was mentoring these students on campus and they said, well, we would ask you to mentor these science students that are all first generation college students. And I asked, I said, what's that? And they said, well, they're first ones in their family to go to college. I'm like, oh, that was me. And I didn't know. But again, looking back on your life and thinking, huh, I didn't come from an environment where this was expected of me. In fact, the opposite was expected of me. And still I found myself here, and without all the other privileges. I didn't have any of those privileges and I still was able to enjoy the learning of chemistry. So I don't think it comes down to privilege. I think it comes down to developing your imagination at a young age.

Danu Poyner

What do you find are the biggest challenges and obstacles to doing that?

Colleen Kelley

Fear. Fear is the number one. When they're afraid of the topic, imagination can't come out of fear. So the first thing I have to do with my class is develop trust and then that trust goes into curiosity. And that curiosity then can go into imagination, and then we can get the real learning done. But that always has to be my sequence. Bonding with my students and trust first. And then eventually we get to imagination.

Danu Poyner

And it's not easy cuz there's a lot of fear actually, that's going on there. What does it look like when you are breaking that down and developing trust? How does that work?

Colleen Kelley

A lot exercises that are not graded that they can see that I'm really, truly interested in seeing what they're thinking as opposed to what I want them to regurgitate to me. So there's a lot of creativity exercises that aren't graded. And then we share and we have fun and say, oh, wow, that's a good idea. So, establishing a safe community within my classroom through exchange of ideas, through not even talking about grades and just opening it up to like, okay, this is what we learned yesterday. I use Shrek a lot in my class. I don't know why I love the movie Shrek. One problem they have to solve is how to reattach Gingy's leg that's been cut off. I give them a different set of chemicals. I'm like, what's gonna be best to reattach Gingy's leg? And when they see that I can be playful, they realize that we can still apply chemistry and molecules to something as playful as Shrek and move past that and really get to deep understanding and learning.

Danu Poyner

It's important that you still have the robust knowledge. Just because it's playful doesn't mean it's not robust and that the learning isn't happening. And so I wonder if there's a kind of seriousness in the lab coat way of doing things. How do you persuade people of the seriousness of it when it's playful?

Colleen Kelley

That's difficult. The students are on board. because we're a community and we create a space for a semester. Collegially and then outside my colleagues at other universities and whatnot, you know, maybe it's not their style. So some of this is just inherent to how playful I am and how I am playful in the world. So it may not be somebody's style. And that's okay. There are still effective teaching practices that don't involve Shrek, for example. But at the same time, I think we all need to present our authentic selves. And I think the feeling of trust and safety will eventually lead to imagination and learning. I think we need to not be this perceived Hollywood version of a professor and show up as ourselves.

Danu Poyner

I think students can size up within a minute or two, whether the teacher cares about them and is interested in them and is gonna create an environment of trust and learning. Students are really turned onto that within minutes. I just think that's so important and it's unfortunately Rarer than it should be. And so, what a gift for students to walk into their chemistry class and find you as the teacher, I just wanted to say.

Colleen Kelley

Well, thank you.

Danu Poyner

Where would you like to get to with this? What's the big hairy, scary, audacious vision? And you hinted at it a bit before when you said there's nothing less than transforming science education. I wonder if you can tell me a bit more about that.

Colleen Kelley

Yeah, I want chemistry to be introduced, starting in elementary school, worldwide. I think we know now that the brain has a plasticity to understand abstract symbols, like musical symbols or for example, Mandarin. Our symbols are just as abstract, and I think we need to introduce chemistry early and then allow people to again, work up to the marathon so that when they get to the university, they're well trained and then can really explore some higher level thinking. but the fundamentals can be learned as early as nine and then built upon. So I think it should be a class just like reading or math. We know that math needs to be a subject taught every single semester. Chemistry's the same, and I know that we say, well, not everybody needs to be a chemist. That's true. But the flip side is that, I just talked to someone yesterday, I had lunch with him and he became a geologist because he couldn't get into medical school cuz he couldn't pass organic chemistry. So I feel like the option should be there. If you want to be a doctor, you have to pass organic chemistry. so if we want more doctors in the world, and especially doctors of color, we're going to need to create a pathway to getting an A in organic chemistry, or they're not going to medical school. So it is this fundamental of that is you take the barrier, what's the barrier to having more physicians of color? It's organic chemistry. And then you start 'em in third, fourth grade with comic books that can reach poorer regions of the world. It's a paper comic book that can be found in libraries. The cost is minimal.

Danu Poyner

That's a very powerful and inspiring vision, Colleen. I can definitely get behind that. If people wanted to explore this for themselves, where would you recommend they start?

Colleen Kelley

I would go to our website, which is kidschemicalsolutions.com.

Danu Poyner

We will put that link, uh, in the show notes for people to have a look. I wanna ask you about the sports drink invention and and the perfume patent. See where those fit into the story.

Colleen Kelley

The sports drink invention. I had even forgotten about that. I think that was like around 2004, something like that. A friend of mine is a cardiologist and we were looking at different sports drinks and thinking, do they really need to be purple? Why are they purple? And what's in them? And is there a way that we can make something that's better for you? And, he really took off with it. I helped with the chemistry on that, but he took off with it as a company. It never made it, it was a startup that ultimately didn't go anywhere. But it was certainly a fun grokkist project for sure. And we learned a lot about different ways to manufacture things and how you have things taste not so sweet and also be as natural as possible and not purple.

Danu Poyner

Yeah. So you managed to get around the purple purple problem. Oh, that's good. And the perfume patent.

Colleen Kelley

Perfume has been a lifelong passion of mine. And sometimes I wonder if that's what made me a chemist. I've always loved scent and I've always been able to use my nose to smell different environments and recognize things like almost find my way. I talked about my military experience where I couldn't find my way on a map, but if there was a trail, like a bloodhound, I could probably find it. And I really appreciate scent. It makes me happy. And, of course it's based on molecules. I have a collection like you would not believe of different perfumes and as a hobby have all the beautiful bottles all over a shelf, everywhere. And follow the trends and look at the old recipes. A lot of the higher end perfumes, a bottle might cost a couple hundred dollars. and I wanted to make it last longer on your skin. So I took a molecule that I knew wouldn't react with the scent, but would allow it to stay on the skin longer. It's almost like if you sprayed the perfume on your skin and then put a blanket over top of it and the blanket kept it there just a little bit longer, and then the blanket would fall off over time, it's like time release scent. And I did most of that work in my kitchen. So Granny Eve is a lot like me.

Danu Poyner

Well, granny Eve has a direct line to Marie Curie. Is she a, a hero of yours?

Colleen Kelley

Oh, Marie Curie. Yeah. In my house right now. I probably have a stack of like seven biographies on her, and every time I read another one I'm like, Ooh, I didn't know that. I love Paris. I love her environment. I love everything about her.

Danu Poyner

what's your favorite thing to tell people about Marie Curie?

Colleen Kelley

So many fun stories. Again, we think of her as this very serious scientist. There is a picture of her that's famous where she is looking at this green glowing flask and staring at it. And I just finished actually a biography a couple weeks ago where it came out that that was posed, like, that's not a real picture. I just laughed so hard.

Danu Poyner

Of course this is just the same problem way back then.

Colleen Kelley

Yeah. Yeah, she had to pose for that. Probably one of my favorite Marie Curie stories. I move around a lot because I'm a spaz, but I also swim. And her daughters, Eve and Irenne taught her how to swim when she was in her fifties. And they would go to the beach and they taught their mom how to do the crawl or the freestyle stroke in the ocean. and Marie started then racing her male colleagues who were from the Sorbonne, and she beat them but she was so competitive in everything that once she learned how to swim, she would go on vacation outside of Brittany and raced them and the daughters would be cheering her on and she's like, I was much faster than Monsieur Perine, wasn't I? Another funny story that I just love is she was on the ship on the way to the United States. They were giving her a gram of radium and it was her turn to leave her cabin and there was a bunch of paparazzi ready for her and they were landing in New York and it was this big celebration and there was no Marie Curie. She wasn't coming out her cabin. And it was because she could not figure out how to turn the light off in her closet, And she didn't wanna waste the electricity. And I love that a two time Nobel Prize winner was completely befuddled by this light in a closet.

Danu Poyner

You said right at the start of this conversation that you like to follow your joy with no plan, but also you are very competitive too, I think, and very ambitious in terms of the project that you're doing. So I'm wondering about how those things go together and whether that's a little bit like Marie Curie too.

Colleen Kelley

Exactly. I would say. Yeah. Yeah. There's a daily plan. I just know enough that life is going to bring me some alternatives that could be just really wonderful if I'm open to them. I probably couldn't have done this project when I'm younger. So I do feel like life got me here in a really nice way. You have to find stillness and you have to listen and that's listening to your insides, whether you call it your intuition, your gut, whatever you believe in. But I think the stillness is where you'll know, and I think we all have ability to know. When we don't follow that knowing is where we're not following our joy. And sometimes our knowing is scary, and sometimes our knowing doesn't make sense and doesn't seem like a good idea to others.

Danu Poyner

It seems like you have a bit of both Poppy and Ray's way of being in the world and sense making.

Colleen Kelley

I have more Ray now that I'm a mother too. Parenthood helps with that.

Danu Poyner

I don't know if it's good to talk about your son for a bit now that you are the mother of a son with a squiggly career as well. What kind of experience is he having as a grokkist in the making

Colleen Kelley

He's doing great. I have a 22 year old son who went to one semester of university and said, this is not for me. And this is something we had known all along, because not one year of a school before that was for him. We knew that, but we thought, well, everyone's going to university, so we'll do the same. We were not following our instincts. We were not knowing, we were not listening. But, I am listening now because I saw how happy he is. He's got a clothing company and he's a model. and really tied into the New York fashion world and has three fashion shows coming up with his line. And I just see him. I recognize the joy I have when I'm writing comics in him, when he's designing clothes and then that makes me know, okay, this is where he needs to be and he's going to learn about life in this way.

Danu Poyner

Has watching him have that experience changed the way that you reflect back on any of your experiences as well?

Colleen Kelley

Hmm, maybe that's a tough question. We are now feel like we're co-creators. We're not collaborators because it's very different projects, but at the same time, we have the same kinds of design blocks and how do you get through that? If something's not inspiring you, how do you keep going when you have a deadline? That kind of thing. I think because my curiosity led through an academic venue that seemed a little bit more traditional, I feel like I got lucky in that way. If I was a visionary maybe at 17 as a fashion designer, I'm not sure if I would've been courageous enough to not go at a traditional pathway and do what he's doing.

Danu Poyner

The way that you talk about your own experience is very grokkist I would say in the sense that people have these expectations for what you might do or how you would go about things, and then you baffle and confound their expectations and very, sure, I'm gonna do this my way, but then also have this whole thing running underneath that that's like, what's wrong with me? Why am I like this? And that goes on for a long time. Then, it kind of works out fine and you get to be more peaceful with it, and it takes care of itself over time. With all of that in mind, I just wondered if watching him have some kind of experience that sounds a bit like that brought up anything for you.

Colleen Kelley

Yeah, I think probably subconsciously, because I know about grokkist and I've embraced it. Him also having those characteristics doesn't scare me. I don't project fear onto him. In fact, I project Joy because he's do also doing some, he has his fashion where he is designing. He's doing a little bit of modeling. He's picking up photography, he built a studio in his garage. He does some DJing. So he also has these grok kist threads going on. And I'm grateful that I've embraced it because now I can also embrace it and support it in him.

Danu Poyner

One of the other fundamental parts of the grokkist experience, I think is the joining together and synthesizing of all of the different weird and random adventures that you have and things that you learn. And sometimes they come together in surprising ways. I notice that you have fairly early on in the comics, your characters swimming around in a bottle of Chanel number 5.

Colleen Kelley

yeah, yeah. There's perfume

Danu Poyner

And so, so the perfume interest has made it in there. Yeah. Was that a conscious decision to do that? It was always gonna happen.

Colleen Kelley

Absolutely. That was always gonna happen. Yeah. Yeah. Because in my mind, I was them swimming in the bottle looking for things. So I, I kind of wanna do that too.

Danu Poyner

Very, very good. So you are working on a number of things at the moment. You've got the comic books, and I think that the plan is to take those through that whole chemistry curriculum. So you've got five of them at the moment. How far are you through it?

Colleen Kelley

About halfway. Yeah.

Danu Poyner

And then you mentioned a whole array of interesting things, like a game and an animated series. Do you wanna talk about those?

Colleen Kelley

Yeah. The card games and the video game all support the comic book line of learning. And what I'm realizing Danu with the comic books is they have to do a lot of heavy lifting. The comic books bear a huge burden on their shoulders where they're going to be in charge of teaching chemistry to the world. They need to be really good. They need to be robust. As much as they need to be entertaining, they need to actually carry that heavy load of teaching chemistry to the world. And the games will help with that. Whether they're a video game or card game, the decoder puzzles, the puzzles, all of that will help with that. So that is one project where I feel like I'm not going to let down my standards. The standards are very high for the level of chemistry that needs to be scaffolded and learned. The animated series is another project with different characters and that's a relatively new project and that's aimed for smaller kids. I wanna reach the five to seven year olds with a different kind of accessibility through an animated series. And that's more, if you will, like a hook. So maybe you've watched the animated series and then you go grab the comic books and start learning, but the characters, everything is very separate. They're not related projects in a way that would be obvious to the eye.

Danu Poyner

So you were like a constellation of things and ways for people to find their way into that world, but the comic books sit at the center of, and kind of the centerpiece of that constellation.

Colleen Kelley

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Danu Poyner

Yeah. Okay. Nice. You've done many things. You've had lots of different experiences, but being a writer and being a comic book producer was not in there. How did you go about learning how to do that? How did you go about grocking it?

Colleen Kelley

I think I learned on the internet. I'm not kidding. I looked up a template for how to write a comic book script. I'm like, okay, so there's a panel and then there's a description and then there's dialogue. And I'm like, well, I'll just give this a whirl. My comic book artist was very helpful. He's done a lot of different projects, so he would tell me, you know, you should only have four to six panels, meaning boxes per page. I didn't know that. Three sometimes, but three looks wonky, but 4, 5 and six look good. Four and six are the best. So if I was having a line of thought it needed to be covered in four to six panels and then move on to the next page, so there was that learning curve on how to write in that format. I give my comic book artist huge props on, I don't even know how he understands what I wrote and make such fabulous comic books out of it, because that is almost no short of a miracle that he gets it. He really gets it. Like, there it is. I'm like, whoa, that's awesome. And he sends me stuff along the way so I can see, but 90% or more of the time he sees what I've written and is able to translate that into a comic book.

Danu Poyner

There's one question I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, which is, if you could gift someone a life changing learning experience, what would it be and why?

Colleen Kelley

So I'm going to say that I would gift someone a surfing lesson.

Danu Poyner

Okay. I'm in. I'm in. Tell me

Colleen Kelley

Okay. So I have taken many surfing lessons in my life, but I'm never really good at it. I can get up on a board and ride a wave in, but what the surfing lesson teaches you is when you let go, you are gonna ride the wave in. When you're holding on tight and really anxious and fearful, you're gonna crash or you're going to tumble over or all the other things. And this ability to just trust in the movement and getting up and balancing and all of those things. And there's also fear. I always have trepidation going into a surfing session. And then you're riding a wave in and you're standing up and you feel like you're on top of the world. So what does life look like on the other side of that fear and that grip. Also, I think I have bailed on surf lessons before because I've had too much fear. And then you're sitting on the sidelines. And so there is that gift of, do I wanna be a spectator or do I wanna go in and try? I think a surf lesson is a really capsuled moment that embraces a lot of big life questions in one experience.

Danu Poyner

I really like that answer. I'm so glad I asked. Thank you for sharing that. You seem like a very fearless person to me, Colleen. I think lots of our listeners will be having that impression of you as well. But I wonder has there been moments when the fear has got you with what you are doing. It's such a big thing that you're doing in this, so a lot of learning curves, a lot of barriers to cross. Has that gotten hold of you, the fear sometimes?

Colleen Kelley

Oh, absolutely. Yes. I had given up a couple times because of the fear of not financially being able to support this project without making any income off of it. And the fear of it just being one more grokkist thing that I did and spent thousands of dollars on what went nowhere.

Danu Poyner

What has pushed you through in those kind of moments?

Colleen Kelley

this particular one is the significance of it and how I really just have to think about the lives that can be changed if I continue on. So you take yourself out of it and you take everything else out of it and it's kind of like, you know, if someone is tragically maybe like under a car, you find the strength to lift the car up even though you're afraid. It has that urgency for me, and I've not felt that much urgency about anything really.

Danu Poyner

Was there a moment when that became noticeable for you? Was that always there? When did that sense of mission really implant itself deeply?

Colleen Kelley

About a year ago, really. I was working with a therapist about trying to find my voice and I had a dream where I was underwater and I was really shouting and nobody could hear me. And, we went through some exercises of just singing and ways to get my voice out. Singing by myself and chanting aloud and really finding my voice. And then when you find your voice, it's really like, okay, now I need to keep going with this. So there was that barrier to finding a voice that was strong enough and that was definitely helpful with different professionals helping me with, you know, what are you afraid of?

Danu Poyner

Thank you for sharing that. What does the voice have to say? What is the voice screaming when it's underwater and everyone can hear?

Colleen Kelley

The voice is saying, everyone can learn chemistry. Everyone should learn chemistry. And the reason that we should all be literate and fluent in chemistry, is so that we can preserve our world. It will give us tools to preserve the environment and to maybe turn back the clock on climate change. It will help save lives. It will help with water shortages that are inevitable. There are a lot of problems coming our way that a computer is not going to solve and we need chemistry still to solve it, more so than ever. And that's my voice. My fear is that we are losing our ability to think about sciences, in particular chemistry, because we're teaching too much coding and too much robotics and too much technology to the exclusion of not learning science.

Danu Poyner

Colleen, it's been a great pleasure talking to you on the podcast today. I really enjoyed hearing what you're doing. I was already appreciative of it coming into this conversation, but I feel like I have a much deeper appreciation for where you're coming from and the strength and conviction that you bring to that. And all of the wholly integrated self and life experience that you're bringing to something really, really important and making it available and accessible to others. So thank you so much for spending the time with me today. Is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you would like to cover?

Colleen Kelley

I would just say Danu that you're an excellent interviewer. myself with a lot of my answers and was like, oh, that's a good one. I feel like you bring the best out in people and I also am eternally grateful for the grokkist movement in finding a cohort of others that are like-minded in the world to build a community with. So, much appreciation for the podcast and also the community that you're building.

Danu Poyner

Oh, thank you very much, Colleen. That's very kind. I appreciate it.

Head Shot

Danu Poyner

Host