Y-MVP Pilot Kicks Off!

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This is a guest post by Maibe Ponet, Senior Director of Digital Fitness Innovation at the YMCA of Greater New York.

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The much-anticipated (at least by us!) Y-MVP pilot program is finally up and running. We kicked off this digital-based teen fitness venture on April 27—the day YMCAs across the US celebrate Healthy Kids Day.

Y-MVP —which strives to create many young valuable players, but stands for Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activity— is now being tested at two YMCA branches in the city: the Bedford-Stuyvesant Y in Brooklyn, and the Harlem Y in Manhattan.

Quick refresher: Y-MVP is a fitness app created for teenagers that participate in YMCA programs. The app, being developed by Learning Times, incorporates game elements such as badges, leaderboard, timeline and social media sharing to excite users about being physically active, and with that drive behavioral change to increase physical activity levels.

Nearly 60 teens signed up to Y-MVP the day of the kick off, which means that they logged in to Y-MVP for the first time, received an introduction to the program and were invited to participate. Since then, our staff has been furiously working on user engagement, making sure that all teens that visit our branches for fitness or non-fitness purposes know about and try out the program.

In this eight-week pilot, we are capturing data on a range of topics including physical activity levels, perceptions of Y fitness programs, social media and badges. This data is of interest for the YMCA, and our supporters Hive Digital Media Learning Fund and the Aetna Foundation.

Above are a few photos of the kick-off event. They show activities at both branches, our interactive kiosks and some of the promotional materials we’ve created to support implementation. We also had performers from Hip Hop Public Health with us, helping us get teens excited and moving.

If you happen to visit the Harlem or Bed-Stuy YMCAs in the next two months and see our kiosks, please send comments or impressions our way.

Stay active and healthy!

Related reading:
Can Digital Media Move Teens Off the Couch? by Maibe Ponet

Making and Reflection: Learnings from Hive Toronto’s NASA Youth Space Challenge

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This is a guest post by Kathryn Meisner, Director of Hive Toronto.

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In last week’s inaugural #teachtheweb Twitter chat about making and learning, participant Chad Sansing succinctly outlined key ways we can learn from making: “design, iteration, documentation, publication, reflection, failing w/ gusto.” In my response, I heartily agreed but noted that reflection is often the missing piece of this puzzle.

The “making as learning” approach is baked into Hive member organizations’ work with youth and it also underlies the way Hive Toronto functions as a network. In efforts to build the reflection piece into the Hive Toronto puzzle, we held our first post-pop-up “High Fives and Debrief” session to discuss most recent event, the NASA Youth Space Challenge.

TLDR

In a nutshell, this debrief conversation showed us:

  • We are indeed meeting a need within the Toronto community
  • Our collaborative process is working
  • We run a mean pop-up

However, in order to level up we need to:

  • Be more proactive about making these opportunities accessible to more youth
  • Tweak some of our collaborative and event-planning processes

The NASA Youth Space Challenge

On April 20th, Hive Toronto hosted the NASA Youth Space Challenge. It was one of 8 locations worldwide that offered a youth branch of the NASA International Space Apps competition. Space Apps “embraces collaborative problem solving with a goal of producing relevant open-source solutions to address global needs applicable to both life on Earth and life in space.”

This pop-up was initiated by MakerKids, a Hive Toronto member – another first for Hive Toronto! MakerKids took on a programming role and worked collaboratively with other members to create stations that utilized their organization’s skill set but added a space twist. I could not be the event lead for this pop-up because I was going to be out of the country on event day. Ashley Lewis, a Hive member via TiffKids, MakerKids, and Girls Learning Code, stepped up to be the lead.

In true Hive pop-up style, the NASA Youth Space Challenge brought together 5 member organizations to provide awesome making and learning stations for youth to explore in a self-directed, interest driven way.

In addition to MakerKids, participating Hive member organizations included Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, Story Planet, FabSpaces, Girls Learning Code as well as the Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration and Mozilla’s Webmaker team.

NYSC - FabSpaces Continue reading →

Maker Party: let’s spark a movement

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This is re-posted from Mark Surman’s blog.

Plans are coming together for Mozilla’s Maker Party 2013. And I’m getting excited. Last year’s party had people making things on the web at 700 local events in 80 countries. This year it’ll be bigger. But, more important, I think this year will plant the foundations for something that lasts well beyond the campaign: a movement of people who want to teach 10s of millions of people how the web works.

Maker Party 2013

Mozilla has built this kind of movement before: when we first launched Firefox. Many people just downloaded Firefox 1.0 because it was great. But others became on-the-ground evangelists and promoters. They told their friends about Firefox. They installed it on other people’s computers. They showed them how to use bookmarks, and pop-up blockers and add-ons. And, over 10,000 of them of them put up money to tell the world about Firefox in a historic two-page Sunday New York Times ad.

Firefox New York Times Ad

In my view, the mentors and local champions who will step up to organize the Mozilla Maker Party are just like the early enthusiasts who helped Firefox get to 500 million users. It’s these people who will show the first million Webmakers what they can make. Who will start awarding badges that reward people for their skill and creativity on the web. And who will create excitement about all the tools and programs across the web the empower people to make and create. These mentors and local champions are the core leaders that Mozilla needs if we want to teach the world the web.

Building on last year’s successful Summer Code Party, Maker Party 2013 has a number of pieces designed specifically to help mentors and local champions succeed. Five that I’m really excited about are:

1. Teach the Web: a nine-week free and open online course for people who want to be Mozilla mentors and local champions. It’s highly collaborative, convening nearly 3,000 participants to share their teaching practice, learning materials and learn to hack the web on the way. The course started last week, but you can still sign up here www.webmaker.org/teach

2. Super mentors: these are the passionate volunteers who really make the online course and marquee Maker Parties happen. They are experienced in teaching the web, running events and creating teaching materials. Starting with their work on Teach the Web, the Super Mentors are the leadership core of the larger Webmaker Mentor community. We already have over 100 super mentors. We hope to have many more by the time Maker Party 2013 is done.

3. A big tent with more than 40 partner organizations joining the Maker Party and carrying out making-and-learning activities across the globe. Like Mozilla, these organizations are part of a growing movement to teach the web and promote the maker spirit with hands-on learning. This network of partners is critical to growing this movement: there is no way any one organization can do this on its own. Mentors can bring their own organizations into this tent as a way to get publicity and recognition, or just as a way to be part of the party.

4. Hackable Activity Kits: simple ‘instructables’ that you can use show people how to make web pages, Popcorn videos, etc. The guides are hackable, forkable HTML pages so you can customize them. OpenMatt explains these kits well in this post.

5. An improved webmaker.org: We’re launching some new features on webmaker.org June 15 to designed for making and learning on the web. Not only have these tools have been designed with mentors in mind, we’ll also be taking mentor feedback and improving them on a constant basis.

While the Maker Party campaign runs from June to September, Mozilla’s hope is to build a lasting network of people around the world who want to teach people how the web works. In September, we’ll be inviting mentors and local organizers to stay involved in Webmaker. This will include invites to MozFest 2013 in London this October, opportunities for continued online mentoring and local organizing and a chance to help shape where we take the Webmaker mentor program in 2014+. In many ways, Maker Party is a kick off for these lasting activities.

Maker Party Timeline

If you are someone who wants to teach the world how the web works — or even just show a few people how to get more creative online — you should get involved. You can start by joining the Teach the Web course or just signing up for Maker Party 2013 updates. Also, start thinking about what you might want to do in your town or city in the coming months. Getting people excited about the web is actually pretty easy. And fun.