Carmen Sandiego Days (also known as Carmen Days) have been popular across United States schools since they were first held in 1988. Inspired by the Carmen Sandiego franchise, these days see schools hold week-long Carmen Sandiego-themed events, aided by packs and prizes originally provided by Broderbund, and later by the franchises' subsequent owners after The Learning Company's acquisition of Broderbund in 1998. The 30th Carmen Sandiego Day took place on January 8, 2018.
History
When Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? was released in 1985, it wasn't an immediate success. It largely found its feet thanks to Apple's Apple Unified School System and Apple's Education Purchase Program, which guaranteed a "nationwide computer-in-the-classroom infrastructure" that had an unprecedented and surreptitious side effect for Carmen Sandiego. Cathy Carlston and Janese Swanson, members of Broderbund's Educational Task Force, leveraged this by creating "Carmen Days", in which teachers and students would dress up as characters from the series, and play Carmen Sandiego video games.
March 4, 1988 saw the very first Carmen Sandiego Day take place in Bluffton, Indiana; it was organised by Jon Bennett of Eastside Elementary School. Broderbund helped out with the event by providing Carmen Sandiego content and a plan to follow. Other schools began holding the days, and Broderbund set up a streamlined system for them to purchase the kit. SAGE students held a Carmen Sandiego Day on November 16, 1990 Valen Maylard created an idea packet for the day entitled "Carmen Sandiego Is in Your Classroom", which incorporated the Carmen Day kit into the proceedings as supplementary material. Seventh- and eighth-grade students of Little Flower School celebrated the day in 1993, which included them playing the video game over 8 weeks in a contest for who could complete the most cases .. They also dressed up as a character from the series and delivered a presentation on them. An event was held at Winding Creek on April 10, 2002.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first Carmen Sandiego Day, the franchise is encouraging schools across the country to creating their own classroom events dedicated to cultural awareness and inquiry-based learning on January 8, 2019. In a live event from 10:30-11:30 AM EST, the show will broadcast a live interview with the voice of Carmen, Gina Rodriguez. It will also show the trailer and clips from the upcoming Netflix show. Finally, students will be selected to compete in a geography.history gameshow entitled Geo Game Show. The live broadcast will be done via dadeschools.tv. In addition, HMH created quizzes and activities for the Day, including Carmen's Geo Handbook and Carmen Quiz Show.
Description
Schools
The exact description of a day varies with the event. In the very first Carmen Sandiego Day, students went on a linguistic, artistic, musical, and geographical tour through locations where Carmen's crooks hid, on the way learning about culture via their favourite sports and chosen cuisines. The first annual Carmen Sandiego Day in Charlotte took place on February 15, 1993, and all 4–6th graders in public, private and parochial schools were asked to participate in the event. Carmen Sandiego Day was recommended as a way to get educators, students and community members to turn into technology users and supporters. In a 1992 event, children explained the computer program to their parents, brought food from different parts of the world, had homerooms compete in the Math Super Bowl competition, and a Media Center containing a Carmen theater, art exhibits, Spanish exhibits, gifted-talented exhibits and hobbies-sports-careers exhibits.