Squiz Kids coming to Canberra with a live show, news, views, quizzes, reptiles and a disco (yes it is a LOT)!

Posted on 5 October, 2023

Are your kids squizzers?

Squiz Kids is Australia’s number one daily news podcast for kids and the child of The Squiz, which is a go-to news and views podcast and daily newsletter for adults.

In a newsworthy move, Squiz Kids is hitting the road, and first stop is Canberra!

Host Bryce Corbett is bringing the award-winning podcast to life on stage and all the family is invited.

Special guests will include the ANU’s resident star gazer, Dr Brad Tucker with a ‘Spaced Out’ segment on life on Mars; Questacon’s David Cannell with a ‘Weird Science’ segment including a liquid hyrdrogen display and a zookeeper from Canberra Zoo + Aquarium who’ll be bringing along a collection of slithery, scaly friends.

And because it wouldn’t be a Squiz Kids event without a quiz, the ever-popular Kids vs Adults S’Quiz will also make its stage debut—to prove once and for all who’s smarter: Generation Alphas or the Gen Zs, Ys and Xs.

Plus – to keep things lively – there’ll be a daytime disco, with tunes spun by Canberra’s very own 10-year-old, DJ Kenkensuprem.

Bryce said while the event promised to be a lot of chaotic fun, there were some important themes to be covered.

A journalist with 25 years’ experience in most major newsrooms around the country, Bryce helped start Squiz Kids alongside Squiz founder Claire Kimball after seeing how his own kids’ media consumption habits were markedly different to his own.

“Kids these days increasingly get their news from social media—and not the traditional sources of news that dominated twenty years ago. Squiz Kids was created to provide in a modern podcast format an easily digestible snapshot for kids of what was happening in the world around them,” he said.

“Our free daily news podcast started in February 2020 and is now listened to by over 160,000 primary school kids and their families every single day including in some 5,000 classrooms—right across Australia, and overseas too. It’s a kid-friendly take on the news headlines—fun, free, fresh.”

Last November Squiz Kids launched a standalone media literacy podcast resource called ‘Newshounds’. Fronted by Squiz-E the Newshound (a detective dog who sniffs out fake stories online) —its objective is to teach kids to stop, think and check before believing everything they see, read or hear on the internet.

Backed by the Google News Initiative, the Newshounds media literacy program is now in over 1750 schools across the country.

The good news is, kids like to be informed, and just like their parents “kids derive enormous currency by feeling as though they have a good handle on what is happening in the world around them,” according to Bryce.

“They just like different stuff to their mums and dads. Which is why we go to great lengths at Squiz Kids to report each day on news stories that we know will resonate with kids”.

This means lots of stories on the animal kingdom, new and exciting scientific discoveries, space, sports and pop culture—taking in everything from TayTay to gaming to news about their favourite YouTube stars.

But there is one important caveat.

“One of the overriding principles at Squiz Kids is that no child will leave a Squiz Kids podcast feeling more anxious about a topic than when they started. So much of the news media these days is about creating a sense of anxiety among audiences. At Squiz Kids, we’re an anxiety-free zone. That doesn’t mean we shy away from the big news stories. We talk about earthquakes, we talk about floods, we talk about conflicts between nations – but we do it in such a way, and with such a tone, that kids are not left feeling unnecessarily anxious about them.”

As Squiz Kids grow up into teens, the question is, will there be a podcast for them too (to bridge the gap between the kids and adult’s versions.

Bryce says they are looking at it.

“They’re a notoriously fickle audience however – and we’re still a humble start up with limited resources. But it’s on the agenda. As for me personally: with two teenage kids, I’m busy with my wife growing a two-person pipeline of grown-up Squizzers—with predictably mixed results. Teenagers … what can you say?”

Meanwhile, Bryce is thrilled to be getting listeners from all around the world and taking the plunge into live shows.

Images courtesy of The Courier Mail