Tag Archives: emoti-con

Hive in THE house–the White House Science Fair 2013

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Today, President Obama is hosting the 3rd Annual White House Science Fair, celebrating the student winners of a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions from across the country.

We are thrilled on several levels.

Zainab and Senque at the White House Science Fair

Zainab and Senque at the White House Science Fair

Hive youth are there to represent! Zainab Oni from MOUSE Corps is presenting the Dining Band, a wrist-mounted Arduino circuit that communicates the location of food on a plate for diners who are blind and visually impaired. The Dining Band won Best Overall project at Emoti-Con! 2012, and Zainab is on the Hive NYC Youth Council currently helping to plan Emoti-Con 2013. She was one of our Hive Street Squad interns last year, is a budding Webmaker, and has written for Huffington Post Teen. Senqué A. Little-Poole from Hive Pittsburgh is also there to showcase his research on how to use anti-virus cells to cure diseases. Both of them exemplify the amazing things young people can do when they are empowered with the tools and skills they need to shape the world around them. And they clearly have bright futures ahead!

President Obama helped kick off this summer’s Maker Party campaign! From the official White House press release announcing new commitments to advance the President’s Educate to Innovate Campaign:

Mozilla and the National Writing Project will lead Maker Party 2013: Learn, Connect, Share, a summer long campaign where teachers, technologists and families across the country will join dozens of partner organizations including the NYC Department of Education, Intel,
and DIY.org to help young people embrace the maker spirit and learn career building STEM skills. The campaign will launch on June 15 with a Hive Learning Pop-up, the first of over 1,000 summer learning events planned as part of the Summer of Making and Connecting supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

Go to www.webmaker.org/party to find out more, sign up to hold an event, become a partner, or just join the party!

Hive Youth Council Meets!

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This is a guest post by Joliz Cedeno from Global Kids.

Youth representing MOUSE, the Rubin Museum, the POINT, MoMA, and Hive HQ gathered at Global Kids to learn about the new launch of the Hive Youth Council. The group is intended to represent the young people served by member organizations of the Hive NYC Learning Network. Over the course of the year they will be responsible for helping to plan network wide events such as game jams, Emoti-Con!, and service days to name a few. Along with being a committee that represents the youth voice in the Hive, they will also be trained in digital media skills such as coding, game design, engineering, and much more.

The first session had students taking part in team-building activities and sharing what are some opportunities they hope to take part in as members of the council. It was evident that aside from learning new skills, they were interested in taking lead and educating their fellow peers. One of the popular requests was to visit other Hive member organizations throughout the year in order to get a better understanding of their missions and interact with their youth members.

They met again the following week in order to deep dive in some of the projects they wanted to get involved in rights away. Pictured above, the youth provided a brief summary of what took place during this session:

We discussed three of the main projects that we will be focusing on during the year. The three projects that we will be working on will be: One Billion Rising, Emoti-con!, and a special project with the Rubin Museum. For the first learning session we will be learning design and filmmaking.  We are very excited to begin this year.

We are excited to see the Hive Youth Council grow and develop this year into a powerhouse of awesome teens taking leadership opportunities and developing lifelong learning skills.

Emoti-Con! 2012 winners

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The following is from a press release announcing the winners of Emoti-Con! 2012:

Last Saturday, 100 tweens, teens and educators from across NYC gathered at Parsons The New School for Design for the 4th Annual Emoti-Con! digital media and technology festival. Throughout the day, youth showcased their digital creations, networked with their peers and industry professionals, competed for prizes, and engaged in a dialogue about the role of digital media and technology in their lives now and looking ahead to the future.

The Emoti-Con! 2012 winning projects were:

  • Best Pitch and Crowd Favorite – The Dining Band, a location- and temperature-sensor wrist band to assist the blind or visually impaired with eating; designed and developed by high schoolers Zainab Oni, Jose Parra, Omar Abreu, Omar Nasr, Winston La, Youssef Saab, and Edvinas Pavliukoit through their work with MOUSE

Dining Band team from MOUSE

  • Most Potential for Social Impact – Stop and Frisk, a multimedia documentary about stop and frisk policies employed by the NYPD, produced by Vincent Marrero, a high school junior, through his participation in the WNYC Radio Rookies initiative

Vincent Marerro from WNYC Radio Rookies

  • Most Entertaining – Run! is a space-themed video game built on Scratch and Arduino, designed and programmed by Merlin DeForest and Axel Lucero, 6th graders in Institute of Play’s after school program, Short Circuit

  • Most Innovative - The T.A.P. project, a series of assistive technology inventions that offer easy solutions to everyday tasks involving fine motor skills, designed and created by high school students Khaleel Anderson, Matthew Kendall, William Turner, and Anthony Winston through their work with the MOUSE Squad at P256Q

Team T.A.P. from MOUSE

Other student projects included Serious Game prototypes, LED artwork, videos and podcasts on topics ranging from neighborhood culture to truancy to horror films to immigration, physical computing projects such as homemade video game controllers, graphic design projects, additional assistive technology projects for the visually impaired, and projects made on 3D printers. Youth from DreamYard, The Parsons Scholars Program, Girls Write Now, Global Kids, WNYC Radio Rookies, MOUSE, New York Public Library, and Institute of Play all presented projects.

In addition to the winners, other featured projects included:

  • Beyond Bullets: Students in the Parsons Scholars program, a three-year, full scholarship college preparation program for New York City public high school students from underserved communities, created a series of PSAs for Beyond Bullets, a non-profit group that educates youth about gun violence.
  • Playing For Peace: a national game design challenge co-led by Global Kids Youth leaders that generated over 1,000 youth-designed video games entries promoting an end to war.

Keynote speakers and judges Naveen Selvadurai, Ayah Bdeir, Jeffrey Yohalem, and Mike Edwards

The keynote speakers, who also served as anonymous judges to identify the finalists, presented on their own career trajectories and provided inspiration to the future tech leaders:

  • Ayah Bdeir, TED Fellow and creator of littleBits, an award-winning kit of pre-assembled circuits that snap together with tiny magnets
  • Mike Edwards, software engineer at The Huffington Post and alumnus of Parsons The New School for Design
  • Naveen Selvadurai, Co-Founder of Foursquare
  • Jeffrey Yohalem, lead writer for the award-winning video game, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood

The event was designed, organized and led by a group of youth dubbed The A-Team, and they received guidance from a steering committee of educators and youth development professionals from Global Kids, Inc., MOUSE, New York Public Library and Parsons The New School for Design.  All participating organizations are members of Hive NYC.

The Emoti-Con! A-Team

Congratulations to everyone that won awards and helped make this year’s Emoti-Con! a success!