Jok Church
Jok Church receives more mail from children than anyone except Santa Claus. And he depends on those letters. They all contain questions about the world and how it works. Church answers those questions from children in newspapers, in books and software, at science museums, and on the Internet and TV.
Jok Church created his comic strip You Can with Beakman & Jax in 1991 for his local newspaper in Marin County, California. He did it for free, hoping to mail clippings of the comic to other newspapers. The comic strip does not answer readers' questions directly. Rather, it gives directions to do a thing, a procedure, an experiment to learn the answer. It's about learning by doing. Active. Not passive.
"Beakman & Jax" is now in nearly 300 newspapers. Six Beakman & Jax books are best-sellers. Church created the CBS television series Beakman's World based on the comic strip, and helped create the museum exhibit that has toured science centers and museums continually since 1998.
Church is also the author and narrator of classroom CD-ROMs from the National Geographic Society on plant life, systems in the human body and on sex education. He consults as an early education specialist for clients such as Apple Computer and Leap Frog.
Church splits his time between a home in Northern California and a farm
in the hills of Tennessee.
