Open Youth Networks’  approach to helping young people become technologically fluent 21st century citizens and change agents draws on three powerful and distinct pedagogical models -  youth-development, liberatory education and foresight thinking.

Karen Pittman described youth development as a process that is aimed at helping youth “meet their basic personal and social needs to be safe, feel cared for, be valued, be useful, and grounded, and (2) to build skills and competencies that allow them to function and contribute in their daily lives. Education for Liberation (Paulo Freire) aims to prepare the most disenfranchised members of our society, in particular low-income youth and youth of color, to create a more just world for themselves and their communities. Foresight thinking or future studies engages youth in a process of trends-analysis and forecasting in order to postulate possible, probable, and preferable futures for themselves and their communities.

These approaches enable us to design curricular experiences that have lasting impact on youth in which they develop agency, motivation, skills and knowledge that prepare them to engage more fully and responsibly in current civic society,  while gaining skills necessary to achieve in higher education and careers involving advanced technologies or participatory media and culture.

Games for Change

For example, we are currently running a summer course for high school students called Games of Change taught by Emily Kuehn and Mindy Faber. This hands-on class emphasizes new creative technologies that allow students to design games and 3D virtual worlds that have direct relevance to everyday experiences, character roles and relationships. Using drag and drop programming tools, participants create animated stories, avatars and game environments about social, global and gender-based issues with the goal of fostering interactive social change.

The program asks youth to design games that reflect their “Values” using Mary Flanagan’s “Values at Play” curriculum. This youth development approach is echoed through community-building exercises and interpretive discussions as well.

Using a liberatory education approach, youth are asked to identify challenges, obstacles and issues that interfere with their freedoms and rights as teenagers. These topics are translated into their game mechanics. Another important aspect of education for liberation involves what we refer to as digital literacy. Aimed at instilling a critical citizenship disposition among youth, digital literacy teaches youth to decode and unpack the meanings behind games, designs and media artifacts. In Games for Change, youth are invited to critically examine how gender, race, violence and community are portrayed positively and negatively in popular video games.

The youth also incorporate foresight principles into their game designs. For example, one team is prototyping a game that takes place in a future in which 2010 world governments failed to adequately respond to threats of global warming. The user becomes critically aware of the consequences of such inaction as they must help find homes for Bangladesh refugees whose country has fallen into the ocean due to rising waters caused by melting polar icecaps.

In order to gain STEM-related skills, students use a software package developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon called Alice designed specifically to teach programming concepts. Alice is a free and open source object-oriented educational programming language with an integrated development environment that is implemented in Java. Alice uses a drag and drop environment to create computer animations using 3D models. Because students are designing games that reflect their concerns and future interests, they are highly motivated to engage in the rigorous and tedious work involved in programming.