Ottawa-produced series Run the Marbles provides STEM education to young children

Cardboard boxes, paper towel rolls and old pool noodles. Most of these items may seem like they are ready to be thrown away, but in fact they can be used to create fun, engaging and educational lessons for children.

That is exactly what GAPC Entertainment is doing. In their new TVO kids series, Run the Marbles, young hosts come together to build marble tracks out of everyday household items.

“It’s really a little engineering series at its core, but for our audience it’s all about building, discovery, having fun,” Hoda Elatawi, GAPC Entertainment executive producer, told CityNews.

While fun to watch, the three-minute episodes provide early STEM lessons for children in a genre Elatawi calls “edutainment.”

“There are hidden and disguised messages for kids but make it digestible and interesting,” she said.

The idea stemmed from a variety of marble run and marble race content on YouTube, but Run the Marbles is a 25-episode series. Each episode is hosted by a teen and a young child between the ages of five and seven, all of whom are Ottawa locals.

Run the Marbles is GAPC’s newest endeavour but the Ottawa-based production company has been filming children’s shows and some documentaries for adults for over 20 years.

“We hear a lot in this country about Toronto and Vancouver for big productions, but these sorts of things are also just as important, if not more, because they’re shaping their young minds,” Elatawi says.

GAPC started as a small company and got even smaller during the pandemic, but the company is holding on, producing most of its children’s content for TVO Kids.

In addition to Run the Marbles, this summer GAPC will be filming a children’s documentary called ‘I Love Being Me.’

“Every episode takes us into the world of a child who is either felt othered or been seen as other,” Elatawi says. “So it could be a kid who has cerebral palsy or it could be a child who’s always been the tallest kid in the class.”

Specializing in children’s edutainment and documentary, Elatawi says GAPC has solidified its position as a unique and boutique company.

Diversity is also something that is very important to the company. Elatawi said when choosing the hosts for the Run the Marbles episodes they made sure that different backgrounds were represented so that children watching could see themselves represented on screen.

TVO has been a leader in showcasing diversity and it was one of the reasons that Elatawi says she was inspired to begin creating children’s content.

“When I had my kids I started watching that they were what they were watching and I was like, ‘Oh, I want them to watch more of TVO kids and less of this other thing’,” she says.

GAPC also produces content for the French children’s programmer TFO. While Run the Marbles is solely English-language content, it was filmed in College la Cité.

“The floor was white, the walls were white. And what that did is it allowed us to showcase the marble runs and the kids,” Elatawi says. “Everything popped, the colors popped because of course everything is in primary colors.”

To check out the kids in action, Run the Marbles launches on TVOkids.com and the TVOkids YouTube channel May 19.

– With files from Natasha O’Neill