Meet NYC’s Young Innovators at Emoti-Con! 2013

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We’re just one week away from Emoti-Con! 2013.

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On Saturday, June 1, over 150 New York City-area middle and high school-aged youth will gather at the New York Public Library Celeste Bartos Forum for the fifth annual Emoti-Con! NYC Youth Digital Media and Technology Challenge. Right now, teens across the city are designing video games, producing films and building digital prototypes that address pressing issues in their global and local learning environments. Once a year, these industrious young designers and inventors gather at Emoti-Con! NYC to meet one another, see cool projects their peers have made, get feedback from industry professionals, and most of all, have fun.

Emoti-con! 2012 winners photo courtesy MOUSE, Inc

Emoti-con! 2012 winners photo courtesy MOUSE, Inc

Hive NYC members comprise a robust network of educators who share, learn and make with each other. Emoti-Con! offers an opportunity to model that practice and all the value that comes from it with young people Hive NYC and across the city.

The heart of Emoti-Con! is a project fair and competition with awards in the following categories:

  • Best Pitch
  • Crowd Favorite
  • Most Entertaining
  • Most Innovative
  • Most Potential for Social Impact
  • Point of View

Some of the projects that will be competing this year include physical computing devices geared towards assisting people with cerebral palsy, wearable technologies that measure and broadcast environmental data such as air pollution, a community-generated narrative of the Hurricane Sandy aftermath, multimedia stories on topics related to US immigration, the water crisis in Haiti, and more.

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Photo courtesy of Emoti-con!

The Crowd Favorite project from Emoti-Con! 2012 was the Dining Band, an assisstive technology device designed to help visually impaired people locate the food on their plate. Later, the team that developed the project had an opportunity to pitch and present the Dining Band at a New York Tech Meet-Up, and one team member even showed it off at this year’s White House Science Fair!

The inspiring and all-star line-up of speakers includes:

Organizations serving on the Emoti-Con! 2013 Steering Committee include: Global Kids, Hive NYC Learning Network, MOUSE, New York Public Library and Parsons The New School for Design. Sponsors include Google, Mozilla and The Pinkerton Foundation.

Emoti-Con! is also a Maker Party! June 15 marks the official kick-off of the global Maker Party campaign, but Emoti-Con! is one early example of how people can get together to make things, share their awesome creations, and celebrate all the things we can make thanks to the web.

Registration for Emoti-Con! closes today, so please sign up if you’re interested in participating! Visit http://www.emoti-con.org or @EmotiCon_NYC on Twitter for more information.

Gamification and Education: the Core Principles

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This is re-posted from Iridescent’s blog and was written by Kevin Miklasz, Director of Digital Curriculum at Iridescent.

 

I always like to say the gaming industry has done in 30 years what the educational industry hasn’t been able to do in 300, namely make self-sustaining learning.  The reason games are fun is that games are learning tools, and people inherently like learning (or more specifically we have an intrinsic motivation towards competence).  I like to think of the gaming industry as a hotbed of educational innovation– games only sell if they are good at letting people learn, so the game industry has gotten extraordinarily good at creating learning.
 
Thus we come to gamification, a term spawned from the idea that if only we could put these game elements into other situations, we could make those situations so much more fun and engaging.  But as described above, if games are learning tools, “gamifying” an experience simply means improving the learning that occurs in an experience. In this light, education seems to paint itself a ready target for gamification efforts.  But, what exactly does it mean to gamify education?

Radio Rookies DIY: Educator’s Guide to Teaching Interviewing Skills

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Cross-posted from WNYC Radio Rookies blog:

Rookies DIY: How to do vox pop

The first in a series of videos we’re creating in partnership with the Hive NYC Learning Network, teaches people to produce their own stories using digital media. This animated short, along with the accompanying resources, will help educators teach interviewing skills to students of all ages.

One of the first skills Radio Rookies learn in our workshops is how to conduct interviews with people on the street, aka: “Vox Pop”, short for vox populi, a Latin phrase meaning “voice of the people.”

Approaching total strangers can be very scary, but in this do-it-yourself (DIY) video Radio Rookies graduates give tips and interviewing techniques that will help you be successful at getting people to answer your questions.

Educators can use this video to teach a interviewing skills — you don’t even need recording equipment!

The most important thing to emphasize is that an interview is really a CONVERSATION between two people. 

Here are some suggested activities based on what tools and technology you have access to:

Paper and Pencils:

+ Have students brainstorm a list of questions they’d want to ask each other
+ Role play mock interviews for the class and have students popcorn out praise and suggestions

  • Give your students these tips and tricks for getting a good interview:
  • Be open to possibilities, but prepare questions before you begin.
  • Stay in control of the situation.
  • Introduce yourself and get the interviewee’s name, age (and contact info, if you can).
  • Don’t be afraid to ask someone to repeat something.
  • Ask open-ended questions.  Avoid Yes-or-No questions — they lead to boring answers.
  • Ask for explanations/ follow-up questions.
  • Don’t talk over your interviewee.  Let them finish completely before you jump in with the next question.Don’t be afraid of silence.
  • Try to ask a question several different ways if you’re not getting a good answer.
  • At the end of an interview always ask: “Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to say?” “Do you have any questions for me?”

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