Edutainment is the key ingredient in everything we produce. We put ourselves in the shoes of the students our content is created for. This process makes what we create culturally authentic and entertaining. By keeping a focus on our target audience, which is the students, our products and services capture their attention with entertainment and engage them with education!

  A Narrative Back Story 

As an artist and educator, Mrs. Finney noticed early on in her teaching career how quickly students memorized and recited hip-hop songs throughout the school day.  While her students walked in the hallways, socialized in the school cafeteria or completed class work, she would find many of them rapping popular hip hop songs or even creating their own lyrics.  These moments led to reflection on her own similar experiences with hip-hop when she attended grade school. So, when introducing math lessons to her class in the traditional fashion, she would see a disconnect in her students.  Eager to have her students engaged in the lesson as well as increase their level of comprehension, Mrs. Finney started creating lyrics that explained the math content she was hired to teach. When she shared the lesson lyrically, her students lit up!  Their excitement for learning increased, and so did their level of comprehension. Administrators, teachers, parents and students expressed their appreciation for Mrs. Finney’s ability to tailor the curriculum to meet the needs of her students. This made for a more rewarding and memorable classroom experience.

Before they were married, Mr. and Mrs. Finney both expressed their desire to help the youth.  At the time, Mr. Finney started a video production company that was tailored to providing the youth with positive information in an entertaining way.  He discussed video projects he completed through his brand name JFINTV®. He produced projects for various organizations like the State of Delaware’s Teen Summit, covering topics such as peer pressure, bullying, and HIV.  As an undergraduate student majoring in Studio Production and Digital Filmmaking, Mr. Finney was required to complete a senior project. So, the two Finney’s used their skills and collaborated to create their first edutainment project together called “Adding Integers After School”. In this video, with a runtime of 5 minute 20 seconds, Mrs. Finney played dual roles as both the teacher and student.  It was a comedic video that taught a lesson on Adding Integers after-school to a struggling student. The video concluded with the lyrics replaying on the screen for the viewer to increase his/her recall of the lyrics used to teach the math concept.

Upon completion of this senior project, they both thought it would be a great idea to share this video with Mrs. Finney's students that were scheduled to receive a lesson on Adding Integers following week.  She decided to introduce the concept of adding integers through this video. She developed a Pre-Test and Post-Test to use before and after the video to determine the effectiveness of introducing the lesson through hip-hop lyrics.  The video was shown to her three classes (a total of 51 students). To their surprise, the data reflected an average of 16 % increase in student comprehension. After reviewing the growth in the results, Mr. Finney asked “How many people do you want to help”?  She replied, “As many as we can.” At that point, they began to develop what is now known as JFINTV® Lyrical Math.