Category Archives: NYC Youth Events

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.

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The We and the I and THE POINT

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In the Audience
For those of us invested in the world of youth and their development, Michel Gondry‘s latest film, The We and the I—which will screen this Wednesday at 7pm at the American Theater in the Bronx—may have a special resonance. A welcome, refreshing change to the often monochromatic and monocultural New York City seen in film and on TV, The We and the I showcases South Bronx teens of color, including queer youth. Gondry was inspired by the experience of entering a Paris subway car and being surrounded by the irrespressible and complex world around him. It is precisely this moment that opens the film, as several teens board the fictional BX66 bus. And while the movie isn’t technically a documentary, Gondry and his young collaborators have still captured something that feels essentially fresh and real.

The We and the I had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, as part of the Directors Fortnight program. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, the Speed movies and Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi, Gondry’s film deploys the trope of forced coexistence: A group of people are brought together by time and circumstance and then embark on a literal and figurative voyage together. In this instance, the microcosm is youth-controlled and Metropolitan Transit Authority–fueled; the film chronicles teens and other passengers traveling through the South Bronx as afternoon becomes evening on the last day of school.

filmmaker and actors

Michel Gondry and actors at THE POINT

On the Bus
Divided into three sections, featuring bullying, confrontation, self-discovery and identity, The We and the I presents a full range of contemporary issues and interpersonal dynamics. It presents a veritable heat map of how teens bond, alienate, retaliate and reconcile in endless cycles. These micro-narratives are depicted through quips, zingers, social humiliations, flashbacks and reenactments. The dramatic punctuations and beats are part melodrama and part fanciful Gondry flourish, resulting in a narrative that is touching, at times surprising and grounded in experiences drawn directly from the actors’ lives.

Although The We and the I touches on a range of pressing youth issues, it’s no “social problem” film. It doesn’t bracket its story with alarming statistics but instead concludes with the personal: As the end credits roll, we hear a touching, funny letter read by the mother of one of the teen performers to Gondry—a communication from caregiver to director. For those of us attuned to teens’ creative development, it’s gratifying to see the straightforward portrayal of their demonstrated interests, whether digital-media production, manga, music or car-racing. One of my favorite moments in the film shows a trio of young women bounding off the bus toward a nondescript building. Although we don’t follow them inside, their purposeful stride and the sign outside their destination—“Art Farm”— provide the necessary clues about what awaits them: people to welcome them and encourage their budding interests.

Mural

One of several murals outside of THE POINT

To THE POINT

Thanked profusely in the credits but never named in the film, THE POINT, a youth-development, arts and culture, and community advocacy group serving the Hunts Point area in the South Bronx, is the real-life organization that centers The We and the I. The movie is the result of an extensive collaboration between Gondry, Partizan Entertainment and the educators, artists, activists and youth-development experts who are the lifeblood of THE POINT. (See The We and the I THE POINT’S Point of View for more details) It is this organization’s extended network that helped fuel the film’s production and perhaps explains the grounded sensibility that defines The We and the I. Based on the teens’ experiences, the film was workshopped at THE POINT, a process that was mediated by the group’s creative and therapeutic professionals. This joint project between Gondry and THE POINT typifies the organization’s drive not only to make meaningful change in Hunts Point but also to transform how outsiders understand life there. As Kellie Terry-Sepulveda, THE POINT’s executive director tells me when we discuss the film, “Nine times out of ten, when Hollywood comes to the Bronx, we don’t see our lives reflected anywhere.”

Depending on your approach, as you enter THE POINT, you may pass a mural in celebration of a multitasking Ganesh, kids maintaining an herb garden, an auto-parts-shop factory, black-and-white photographs sparkling with the glow of actual film and emulsion, or a subway car graffitied by the world-renowned Tats Cru. Inside the building, each nook and cranny houses its own small enterprise, community project or service, such as Blank Plate Culinary Arts and Design Classes, the young women’s empowerment group, Where Our Minds Empower Needs (WOMEN), Open Hydrant Theater Company, Society for Aquaponic Values and Education and many others.

Educators and teens

Educators and teens from THE POINT working on Global Action Project’s Media History Timeline.

Peer To Peer
On my recent trip to THE POINT, it’s noon on Saturday; I had just seen The We and the I at the IFC Center the night before. Open Hydrant is doing a script reading at a table in the atrium. A few doors are open, but many of the warrens that make up the space are sparsely inhabited. As I head up to the Teen Loft, though, it’s a different story: I see that educators and kids from Global Action Project (GAP), a youth-development organization that focuses on using media analysis and production to address social-justice issues, have joined the teens from THE POINT’s Activists Coming to Inform Our Neighborhood (ACTION) grou[ for a Hive Digital Media and Learning Fund–sponsored workshop entitled, “Making Media, Shaping History.”

Together, they are an impressive group, comprising youth who have made real change in their communities and travelled widely sharing skills and knowledge. But now they are eating pizza and breaking the ice by kidding around; later they’ll break into a game of Ninja. It’s great to see a couple of familiar faces from The We and the I, the two actors in the film who are still in high school. This is also one of those great Hive NYC moments when you see in action some of the core beliefs that bring our learning network together.

Essentially, what I saw that afternoon was just some of the real story behind Gondry’s fictional film: THE POINT’s free workshops and its focus on leadership, social change, creativity and college and career readiness. As Terry-Sepulveda emphasizes, “We work with a youth-centered model. Every issue you see in the film is something that THE POINT addresses on a regular, sustainable basis.”

The We and the I is being screened on Wednesday, April 17, at 7pm at the American Theater in the Bronx. After the screening, actors from the film and educators from THE POINT will be present to discuss their role and their objectives in working with Gondry. Tickets are $9 per person and can be purchased online. For additional information, please call THE POINT: 718.542.4139

Global Kids and Hive NYC Badge Design Reflection

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This is a guest post by Daria Ng, a Senior Program Associate at Global Kids. Next week she’ll continue her work with international education as a consultant for UNICEF.

Global Kids has experimented with digital badging in various contexts for the past few years. From badging an afterschool program four years ago at the New York Public Library, to badging the Urban Biodiversity Network program at the American Museum of Natural History, Global Kids has used digital assessment to support youth to recognize, talk about, and demonstrate essential digital literacy skills. Currently, we are consulting with three schools as they develop badging systems for their students, developing our own badging system for all Global Kids youth programs, and supporting Hive NYC and Hive Chicago to build their digital badging systems and infrastructures.

For the past year and a half, Global Kids has been navigating the badge universe. Global Kids has followed the growing interest in badges in both formal and informal learning contexts, and been well aware of the questions, confusion, and opposition towards badging as assessment. One thing Global Kids knows for sure is that badging is an iterative, hands-on process—the only way to learn about badges is through their design and implementation. As an organization, we have learned so much through the introduction of badges to youth. We have learned from the schools we work with, our experience this past summer, and by hearing from others who have implemented badging systems. For example, we are in our second year of a badging system we helped implement at the Epstein School in Atlanta for sixth and seventh graders. And this past summer, we badged Global Kids’ geocaching and virtual video program, Race to the White House.

rwh badges

At Global Kids, we have envisioned badge development as an approach to: provide alternative assessment, gamify education, scaffold learning, develop lifelong learning skills, drive digital media and learning, and democratize the learning and credit acquisition process. Read more about each of these six framing guidelines here. Our need to incorporate badges into our learning design, arose out of our observations that youth participants were gaining new skills around leadership, global literacy, digital literacy, and other 21st century learning skills through Global Kids, but when it came time to write resumes, apply for jobs, or draft college essays, they struggled to articulate and identify these new-found skills and instead defaulted to listing their more traditional academic experiences, such as standardized test scores, and report cards. They discounted interest-driven learning, out-of-school experiences and the connected learning that we know to be so important to their academic, civic and professional development.

activist digital advocacy game guru

Funding from The MacArthur Foundation has enabled Global Kids to spend the past year offering in-person professional development workshops to develop digital badging systems for Hive Learning Network members in New York City and Chicago. Trainings consisted of the what and why of badges, incorporating Global Kids’ six framing guidelines in the design process, recommendations for badge integration and workflows, member updates, and use of badge-based learning programs such as BadgeStack. We built a community site and listerv where Hive members doing badging work can post updates and share their work, and where Global Kids can also share resources for everyone to benefit from including reports, case studies, etc.

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In addition to training Hive members, Global Kids has also been supported to develop network-level badges for Hive NYC. These badges will serve as a meta-assessment and incentivization system to help the network share learnings and experiences across organizations, programs, and events. While Hive Chicago began with robust discussions about network-wide badges, Hive NYC has been more focused on organizational and programmatic badges. Global Kids and Hive NYC staff began meeting in October 2012 to design a badge that would serve all participating organizations in Hive Learning Networks.

As Global Kids and Hive HQ began the badge system development process, one of our first design decisions was that cross-network badges for Hive NYC should emphasize the learning pathways that connect youth to the experience and dispositions of a meaningful and fulfilling networked learned experience. We were interested in taking the often abstract rhizomatic learning of the network and translating and visualizing it for Hive NYC’s youth participants.

The goals identified were:

  • Track/model the connected learning experience
  • Motivate cross-network participation
  • Increase participation in Hive network events
  • Acknowledge digital media skills/expertise
  • Demonstrate the Network’s key values and behaviors
  • Identify potential learning pathways and opportunities available through the network

When Global Kids began training Hive members, our strategy included sharing what we knew from our experiences, building the badging community within the network, and incorporating member feedback to develop a relevant system that would work for them. Since badging at the network level was new for everyone, we anticipated that there would be a lot that we wouldn’t know, but that we’d discover through the process. We didn’t know what kinds of social practices and needs would arise when members started using the system and designing badges for their programs. For example, one need that arose from the membership was a desire to badge for the one-time events and incubator projects organized by partnering Hive organizations.

badge training

Hive NYC’s particular focus on pop-ups, learning events and short-term collaborations indicated a need to issue a network-wide, plug and play system that organizations could use to leverage larger thinking and learning pathways within the network. After identifying goals, we turned our focus to our end users—the NYC youth that participate in Hive NYC programs. We developed user stories to encompass a diversity of young people who we’d met through our programs and events.

Hive NYC User Stories

Zakia is a 16-yr old student at Hudson High School. She is an active member of MOUSE and has successfully completed several workshops. Zakia has worked with physical computing, design, and is familiar with HTML and Mozilla’s X-Ray Goggles tool. This summer she was an intern at Hive NYC and increased her HTML and CSS proficiency. She also participated in skill shares with Hive NYC youth from Brooklyn Public Library, Rubin Museum of Art and Summer Code Parties. She has attended Emoti-Con, Maker Faire and a Makerbot workshop at Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.

Walid is 15 years old. He attended a Summer Code Party event in 2012 with a friend who found out about Hive NYC through Facebook. Walid is into video and loves messing around with YouTube, and had a great time learning about Mozilla’s video remix tools. He’d probably attend more events or would definitely take a workshop—if he knew more about Hive NYC’s focus on youth, making and learning.

After developing about five user stories, we were able to identify several big design questions:

  1. How does youth participation in Hive NYC member programs connect and inform the larger network badge system?
  2. How can we incentivize participation and connected learning while and keep badges meaningful (ie avoid over badging)?
  3. What is the user experience, the look and feel of the Hive NYC badge?
  4. What are the trajectories for badge awards? And how do we make these awards relevant to youth in the network?
  5. What network behaviors should be encouraged?

As we tackled these big questions, the work of Ruth Schmidt, a Senior Designer at Doblin who helped Hive Chicago develop their thinking about the badge process, became very useful for us in NYC. Schmidt’s framework for thinking about badge construction, became a core element and inspiration for our work.

We went through each of the identified steps for badge construction—analyzing each one and determining its relevance for our design process. All of this helped inform our next and most challenging (and time-consuming step): brainstorming, developing, and detailing the youth activities and “challenges” to assess and badge.

Since we know we want the Hive NYC badge system to help youth experience the city and various Hive NYC programs, we decided to use location-based activities to structure the learning pathways of the badges. In its current design, a user must complete an activity or set of challenges either online or during a face-to-face event and submit evidence (a link, blog post, video or document) in order to earn a badge. As a learning laboratory with an emphasis on open, reflective, hands-on making, we felt that tying the badges to specific activities and products was crucial to our approach. So far, each badge and challenge has a youth-facing description. Although the titles have not been user-tested with youth the basic challenges are developed. For example:
HiveologistRecruiterFirestarter

Hive-ologist Badge
Can you represent Hive NYC and explain its who, what, when, why, and how?

Hive-ologist Challenges:

  • Present at a public event and speak about Hive NYC
  • Send in the website links of least 5 Hive NYC organizations
  • Name at least 10 organizations in Hive NYC

Recruiter Badge
You’ve discovered the innate beauty of Hive NYC. You’ve met Hivers and attended Hive NYC events all over the city. Now your job is to convince a friend to take a ride on the Hive NYC crazy train. Caution: learning and making ahead!

Recruiter Challenges:

  • Post a picture or photo of you and your friend at a Hive NYC event
  • Collect a comment of what your friend thought of the event
  • Submit documentation of something your friend made at the event

Currently, we have developed 14 Hive NYC badges and associated challenges, but our work is far from over. Our next steps include:

  • Choosing the right platform for Hive NYC badges
  • Finalizing the badge icons
  • Testing Hive NYC badges at an upcoming event (see below)
  • Gathering feedback from youth and educators

explore create badgeshare

In the spirit of learning by doing, we are testing out Hive NYC badges using the Credly platform at the Level Up Teen Game Jam that concluded yesterday. Hosted by the Museum of Moving Image, the event is held in conjunction with IndieCade East, the National STEM Video Game Challenge, Mozilla’s Game_On competition and Institute of Play’s Gamekit launch. Typical of Hive’s cross-network and interdisciplinary approach, teens will meet professional game designers, play indie and vintage video games, then build their own analog and digital game prototypes, earning digital badges and stickers to mark the achievement of new skills. We’ll be using the event’s focus on prototyping and sharing to assess three skills that are critical to the Hive NYC DNA—exploring, creating and sharing. We’ll be reporting back with more details of how our beta-test and pilot experiences go.