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Curiosity transcends the intangible, The Curiosity Project is born

by

Published April 15, 2011

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This is the landing page of Curiosity, a Discovery Channel website designed for users to ask and answer questions about anything, which will be officially launched on Monday, May 23. For the extremely curious, a beta version of the website is accessible here.

– Hilda Huang

The Discovery Channel will launch Curiosity, a site dedicated to answering questions asked by the curious public, on Monday, May 23.

Jeffrey Arnold, chief architect of The Curiosity Project, provided a “sneak pique” of the site at the 2011 Entertainment Gathering Conference held in Monterey from April 7-9. In collaboration with The Discovery Channel and utilizing the infrastructure of its Discovery Education Videos, Curiosity encourages people to ask questions and to contribute in answering others’ questions.

Since “there are thousands of schools subscribing to these [Discovery Education] videos” already, Curiosity can efficiently stream pre-uploaded videos right from the launch date, without the extra hassle of configurations, according to Arnold.

Every week, Arnold and his team plan to upload video clips of experts, the interested and the curious from all possible fields addressing questions on the site.  If a question is not already posted, users can ask their own inquisitive questions.

Special features will allow students and their teachers to collaborate in asking and answering the questions of life.

 “Teachers will have profile pages and their followers will be their students or students’ parents,” Arnold said.

“The question is how to go from interested to obsessed [in a certain field of interest],” Arnold said. He hopes Curiosity will aid in this crucial step.

“I think curiosity is everything [in learning] because it evokes passion,” he added. According to him, curiosity and passion drive the action needed to succeed.

An architectural home page will show the most popular questions, sizing boxes with photos and questions relative to its importance. Contributors may make their own profile, like on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter, and connect with peers.

Curiosity Beta is now up and running at curiosity.discovery.com, and visitors will encounter a similar but less sleek version of the final site, with questions ranging from archaeology to artificial intelligence. Currently, HowStuffWorks provides many of the articles answering the active questions.

Curiosity invites the public to ask questions before the site launches by emailing ask_curiosity@discovery.com and join the site by emailing join_curiosity@discovery.com.


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