Tiff Nexus: Youth New Media Literacies Jam.
A month has gone by without a post, even though I meant to many times. Mainly because of final projects for classes, but also because of some other non-academic projects that I’ve been involved with. Tomorrow at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, TIFF NEXUS (a sort of New Media Initiative started by TIFF) is hosting the final conference of it’s first round of Initatives.
Previously TIFF Nexus had hosted a conference on Locative Media, including a Creative Jam called the Peripherals Initiative, which paired game developers with hardware hackers to create new means of game interaction. It was followed up with a conference on Women in Film, Games and New Media, which featured a creative jam called the Difference Engine; a creative incubator designed to jumpstart teams of first time female video game makers.
And now TIFF Nexus is hosting a conference on Youth New Media Literacies, which is tomorrow, April 20th. And, following the trend, Nexus also hosted a Youth New Media Literacies Creative Jam, one which I was fortunate enough to participate in.
The Jam consists of 5 teams, each tasked with creating a project that teaches Youth (aged 10-13) New Media Literacies. We were all pretty much left to our own devices, in that sort of free and autonomous kind of way, to create a project that we felt hit on as many as the NMLs that we could squeeze in.
While the conference is tomorrow I’m sure that no one will mind if I post a bit about our project, called WeBuiltThisCity, which is a collaborative, crowdsourced city building game/ curriculum platform that teaches kids the basics in 3D digital design, Urban Planning, and much more. It’s modular and scenario based, giving educators and kids the opportunity to build and great their own games for the platform.
I have to do a 7 minute presentation on the project tomorrow during the conference, so I’m going to go prep, in the meantime check out the video teaser TIFF Nexus put together.
