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
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.
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:
- Limor “Ladyada” Fried, engineer and founder of Adafruit Industries. Recently named Entrepreneur of the Year (Entrepreneur Magazine)
- Chloe Varelidi, game designer and co-founder of Athens Plaython, a street games festival which transforms the city of Athens into a giant playground
- Teresa Rivera, alumna from THE POINT’s teen community leadership group A.C.T.I.O.N, .and co-star of Michel Gondry’s feature film, “The We And The I”
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.
Give your students these tips and tricks for getting a good interview: