Kids Connect
 

Check out our new Kidz Connect blog (yes, that's "Kidz" with a "z" now) - it's been re-branded and updated with our current plans to connect students at the Patel Conservatory in Tampa, Florida with students at the IVKO Montessori School in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Participants will write, create and perform a live show together, learning about each other's culture in the process through music, dance, digital art and storytelling within Second Life.

Following is information about the pilot project, which ran in summer 2006:

Kids Connect is a program that connects young people in different countries via media art, performance, and creative collaboration within virtual worlds such as Second Life. We introduce students to theatrical and digital methods, building a solid foundation of audio, visual and programming knowledge through which they can tell stories about their lives. Participants connect and create with other students via audio/visual and streaming Internet technologies within the online virtual world of Second Life.

In our pilot program in summer 2006, students in New York, New York, connected and created with students in Amsterdam, Netherlands, via video streaming and in Second Life.

Guided by artists and educators from theatre and digital arts, students learned skills like VJ-ing, Playback Theatre, digital storytelling, and 3D modeling. In Second Life, they met and collaborated to build a hybrid virtual city combining aspects of both New York and Amsterdam. Within that common space, they created a performance that occurred both live and online simultaneously.

Josephine Dorado and Dan Winckler directed the workshops in New York. Tanja den Broeder and Jeroen Frans directed the workshops in Amsterdam.

New York< >Nieuw Amsterdam was the theme of the summer 2006 workshops -- exploring New York’s dutch heritage, (the city was known as “Nieuw Amsterdam” in the 17th century) and the connection between historical and contemporary culture in New York and Amsterdam. Through digital storytelling and streaming video and audio, a tale of two cities was created.
 
Images from our Flickr photo site:
 
 

Participants learned and explored:

  • digital storytelling
  • live visual performance (including VJ-ing and video improv)
  • improvisational theater
  • soundscaping
  • sound recording and manipulation
  • video editing
  • live video streaming
  • collaborative performance
  • videoconferencing
  • 3D modeling in Second Life
  • programming (Second Life object scripting)

Workshop descriptions:

  • Theater games, sound and movement experimentation, and improvisational exercises, providing a foundation for creative play between the students
  • Guest teacher Hannah Fox and her cast from Big Apple Playback Theatre taught the Playback technique, in which the performers ask the audience for real stories from their lives and then "play back" those stories on stage
  • Rob Neill, managing director of the New York Neo-Futurists, taught the the Neo-Futurist technique: "always perform from a perspective of absolute honesty...as ourselves on stage, speaking directly from our personal experiences"
  • The theme of "New York <> Nieuw Amsterdam" was explored and students researched their city's Dutch history on the Internet
  • Digital storytelling through still and moving images: students learned how to shoot digital photos and video and edit them in Apple iMovie to tell stories
  • Physics and perception of sound, and effective microphone use and recording with audio recording expert Karl Wenninger
  • Collaborative visual performance: multi-user audio/visual jams via the Internet, taught by visualist/programmer Eric Redlinger
  • VJ-U: how to be a VJ! In which we made a music video and a welcome video showing who we are for the Amsterdam students, taught by master VJ Benton C. Bainbridge
  • Movement and Synthesis: dance improvisation and audio/visual performance with dancer/visualist Marlon Barrios-Solano
  • Second Life: navigation, identity and communication in online virtual worlds, building and texturing 3D models, and scripting, taught by Second Life guest teachers Katie Farrell and Sean Farrell in New York and Jeroen Frans in Amsterdam
  • Collaborative building of the Kids Connect island in Second Life via multi-user online authoring (wikis)
  • Simultaneous theatrical performance in real life and Second Life, enabling cultural exchange with Amsterdam students through Playback Theatre

 
 
Check out our Flickr photo site and our wiki site which documents our development and progress
 
digi-glossary
digital storytelling: creating narratives through various digital media including video, audio, web-based stories, etc.
live video streaming: video that is delivered over computer networks and the Internet in real time
networked performance: performance that connects people in different locations via audio/video streams on the Internet
soundscaping: creating a sound "portrait" of an environment
Second Life object scripting: you can apply scripts (programming code) to objects in the virtual world of Second Life, thereby controlling the behavior of the objects
VJ-ing: derived from the term video jockey, refers to video performance artists creating live visuals to music
video improv: the integration of video into improvisational performance
 
 
This series was made possible by a consortium of organizations including Imagine IC, the Integrated Digital Media Institute of Polytechnic University, Polytechnic University, the Promise Fund's Center for Youth and Engineering in Science (YES), Waag Society for Old and New Media, ZoomLab.