Youth-Led Tech

Youth-Led Tech 2015 By The Numbers

Smart Chicago

“Youth-led Tech | Summer 2015” was a technology mentoring program in five Chicago neighborhoods: Austin, Englewood, Humboldt Park, North Lawndale, and Roseland.

Youth-Led Tech 2015 was a success. Here’s some numbers:

  • We received 351 applications for this program. 69 in Austin, 62 in Englewood, 91 in Humboldt Park, 57 in North Lawndale, and 73 in Roseland
  • We declined 110 applications that did not meet that requirement that the youth be from one of the 18 target populations and communities of Get IN Chicago
  • 220 applications were accepted. The remaining 21 applications were duplicates or contained errors
  • 141 youth completed the program: 26 in Austin, 25 in Englewood, 32 in Humboldt Park, 26 in North Lawndale, and 32 in Roseland. All of these youth met the attendance requirement (80% attendance after the first week, since we were still heavily recruiting at that time), created a website, and completed four hours of financial literacy training
  • Of the 80 youth that were accepted but did not complete the program, the majority never started. We did informal phone surveys after the first week, and the main reason for not attending was acceptance at another summer program, employment, and/or some other scheduling conflict
  • A small number of youth at each location (less than 5) started the program and left sometime after the program began. Main reasons were schedule conflicts. Some youth were removed based on behavior issues
  • We gave out 129 free Ventra cards to the youth. Some of the youth declined the card because they walked or were driven to the program
  • We ordered, delivered, and served thousands of meals for youth, instructions, as well as for our colleagues at each location and members of the community. More details as we crunch the numbers

A closer look

Here’s a closer look at the program in each of our locations:

Austin

The bulk of this program was delivered in a first-floor classroom at Christ The King Jesuit College Preparatory School, 5088 W. Jackson Blvd Chicago IL 60644. The last week of the program held at Neighborhood Empowerments for a Better Communities (NEBC), 4628 W. Washington Blvd.Chicago, IL 60644. Here’s a look at this digital skills learning environment.

Humboldt Park

We used the cafeteria of Association House of Chicago 1116 N. Kedzie Ave. Chicago IL 60651 for this program. Here’s pictures and some detailed descriptions.

Englewood

We used a portion of the second floor of Teamwork Englewood, 815 W. 63rd St. #2, Chicago IL 60621 for this neighborhood program. Here’s a closer look at the space.

North Lawndale

We used a basement office in Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros. 3415 W. 13th Pl. Chicago IL 60623 to deliver this program. Here’s pictures of the space, along with the outdoor area and basketball court.

Roseland

We used a portion of the Dr. Elzie Young Community Center, 9400 S. Perry Ave. Chicago IL 60620 for our program in this neighborhood. Here’s images and a description.

Digital Learning Environments: Teamwork Englewood

Smart Chicago

Note: this is part of a series of posts in our Connect Chicago program where we describe in detail digital skills learning environments throughout the city.

The 2015 Youth-Led Tech program was delivered in a second-floor space of Teamwork Englewood, which was formed in 2003 as part of the New Communities Program, sponsored by Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and the MacArthur Foundation. Its goal is to unite the many organizations serving Englewood residents and work toward the common goal of building a stronger community.

The room was spacious, with ample tables and chairs to accommodate the youth and their computers.

Englewood Codes

We had a whiteboard:

Teamwork Englewood

And we were able to bring in a projector to do group work:

projector

Plenty of room to spread out for projects:

Teamwork Englewood

Outdoor space for breaks:

Teamwork Englewood

Here’s a full set of photos:

130 Chicago Youth Learn Web-based Tech and Earn Microsoft Laptops

Kyla Williams

YouthledTech-logo

Smart Chicago Collaborative in partnership with Get In Chicago and Microsoft will celebrate 130 student’s completion of the 6-week Youth-led Tech Program. A certificate of completion ceremony will be conducted at Microsoft’s Midwest District office located at 200 East Randolph Drive, Suite 200, Chicago, IL, from 3pm to 6pm today.

“Youth-led Tech | Summer 2015” is a pilot technology mentoring program in five Chicago neighborhoods: Austin, Englewood, Humboldt Park, North Lawndale, and Roseland. This program is funded through Get IN Chicago, whose mission is to support programs that lead to a sustainable reduction in violence for individuals and communities most affected by violence and poverty. Youth who completed all of their learning hours will earn the Microsoft based laptop used during programming at the certificate ceremony.

The conceptual model for this program is “youth-led tech”, which means teaching technology in the context of the needs and priorities of young people. Youth learned how to use free and inexpensive Web tools to make websites and use social media to build skills, generate revenue, and get jobs in the growing technology industry. The youth also learned about other jobs in tech— strategy, project management, design, and so on. Additionally, the youth were provided introductory content about game design and app development.

All of the youth now know how to set up a website, have been exposed to sophisticated tech skills, and know how to find real customers and employers for their skills. “I am really proud of the commitment to learn demonstrated by the youth in this program”, says Smart Chicago Executive Director Daniel O’Neil. “It’s tough being a kid today, especially in some of these neighborhoods with significant safety concerns, but once these youth showed up for one class session, they were hooked and kept coming, kept learning, and most importantly stayed safe this summer.

 

 

Digital Learning Environments: Christ The King High School in Austin

Smart Chicago

Note: this is part of a series of posts in our Connect Chicago program where we describe in detail digital skills learning environments throughout the city.

Christ The King Jesuit College Preparatory School at 5088 W. Jackson Blvd Chicago IL 60644 is a Catholic Jesuit secondary school using the Cristo Rey model to serve young men and women from the Austin neighborhood and surrounding communities of Chicago’s West Side.

The building, opened in 2010, is impressive— full of light, well laid-out, and in pristine condition.

Christ the King, Austin Christ the King, Austin, Chapel

Sessions are held in room 105, right at the entrance. It’s named after Steven Biko:

Christ the King, Austin: Classroom 105 / Steven Biko

The classroom is equipped with a projector and laptop, great desks, and whiteboards. Youth-Led Tech, Austin

Each of the youth has their own laptop, provided by Smart Chicago through funds from Get IN Chicago.

Youth-Led Tech, Austin

There’s a great enclosed, outdoor space for busting out.

Christ the King, Stations of the Cross, Austin A great cafeteria space and a gymnasium, all on the same floor. Lunch at Youth-Led Tech, Austin

IMG_0733

Christ the King was a great location for Youth-Led Tech in Austin. Bonus: here’s a video I made of my recent visit: 

Digital Learning Environments: Dr. Elzie Young Community Center in Roseland

Smart Chicago

Note: this is part of a series of posts in our Connect Chicago program where we describe in detail digital skills learning environments throughout the city.

We conducted our Youth-Led Tech 2015 program in a portion of this community center in the Roseland neighborhood. The space was large, cool, and well-configured for group learning.

Roseland Youth-Led Tech

The youth were able to make the space their own:

Roseland Youth-Led Tech

And the parking lot was good for breaks:

Roseland Youth-Led Tech

See a complete set of photos here:

Youth Led Tech: Introduction to how the web works

Smart Chicago

Arpanet_logical_map,_march_1977

As part of our Youth Led Tech Program, we’re teaching youth digital skills. We’ve open sourced our curriculum in a series of blog posts. This particular lesson plan was adapted by Christopher Whitaker from the “Brief History of The Internet” from the Internet Society. 

Introduction to How the Web Works

This module will teach students the basics of how the web works including the concept of ‘The Cloud”, the World Wide Web, DNS/Web Addresses, and how content appears in the browser.

Part One: The History of the Internet

Let’s say you wrote a really cool song on your computer. Without the internet the song would just stay on your laptop. To share it, you’d have to have somebody come over and look at your laptop – or you’d have to download it onto a floppy disk (What they had before USBs) and physically carry it over.

This is how computers used to work. And it was a bit of a problem for scientists trying to work collaboratively. Instead of shipping documents from universities on the east coast to the west coast, it would be a lot easier if one computer could just pick up a phone and call the other.

Which is exactly what they did.

In 1965, a professor at MIT used a phone line to call up a computer at UCLA and send information back and forth. This was the first (very small) network. The government saw value with this and funded an experiment called ARPAnet. Computers from across the country were added to the network becoming a ‘web’ of computers.

But, this network had a problem. It began to grow large enough to where one computer couldn’t find another specific computer. Imagine that you’re wanting to visit a friends house for the first time, but there are no street numbers. You’d get lost pretty easily.

To solve this, Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn created the TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. It had four ground rules:

  • Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
  • Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet (information) didn’t make it to the final destination, it would shortly be sent again from the source.
  • Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
  • There would be no global control at the operations level.

The protocol also had a system for giving each device connected to the network an address called an IP Address.

Activity

Everyone take out their phones or laptop. Google “What’s my IP address”

Now, notice that if you’re not on the wifi your address is different from the one on your computer. Every internet connection has it’s own address. Every website also has an address too.

Now, go into the address bar and enter 173.252.110.27

See, it really works – that’s Facebook’s address on the Internet

DNS

The problem with the IP address is that nobody can remember all the numbers needed to get everywhere on the web.

So, they developed services called “Domain Name Servers” that give addresses like 173.252.110.27 names like “Facebook.com”

DNS servers act like Google Maps for your computer. It works like this:

  1. You tell your browser that you want to go to “mikvachallenge.org”
  2. Your computer calls up a DNS server to ask for directions to mikvachallenge.org
  3. The DNS servers looks through all the addresses in all of the internet and find: 67.202.93.0
  4. The DNS tells your browser where to find the site. Your browser then points itself to 67.202.93.0
  5. www.mikvachallenge.org pops up in your browser!

Web Hosting

The other problem with the early network is that those computers had to be on and connected all the time to work. It also became hard for a lot of people to try to access the same file on a single machine all at the same time.

Could you imagine 500 people trying to call you at once? Doesn’t work that well.

The people who were building the Internet needed a way to serve the information to a lot of people at once. The answer became dedicated computers that would ‘serve’ people information called servers.

YouTube has hundreds of server room that hold thousands of cat videos. When you point your browser to the funny video of your choice, the server ‘serves’ your video to your web browser.

Not everyone has to have a server room to host their websites. Expunge.io uses a service called “Amazon Web Services” to borrow their server. (Yes, you really can order everything from Amazon.”

Conclusion 

This should give you a basic idea of how the web works. There’s a lot more complexity to it, but for those interested in learning more should check out these resources.