CORAL LONG BEACH YOUTH INSTITUTE 2003
‘ CREATIVE DIGITAL ARTS’

      The CORAL Long Beach Youth Institute has recruited forty new students from five area high schools around Long Beach. We held our first Parent Meeting March 27th. During this meeting, we set up expectations, reviewed activities, had team building exercises, and answered parents’ questions about the Institute. Our second meeting took place April 30th with an assignment on pre-perceptions of the Institute for the students. We do this to see what their expectations are and to ascertain their computer keyboarding and writing skills. Our third meeting was on May 27th, and focused on planning the upcoming Team Building Wilderness Retreat at Kings Canyon National Park.

      Our actual summer institute will begin June 16th and end with graduation on August 8th. Our theme this summer will be ‘Creative Digital Arts’. Students will be placed in project teams and carry out multiple assigned tasks towards the creation of a short film, and a Teen Magazine. We will be doing all project based learning activities largely based on ‘The Buck Institutes’ methodology on Project-Based Learning. The activities that we have planned will be for each project team consisting of eight students to create a short film. During this process, they will learn storyboarding, pre-production, production, and post-production editing. They will work with i-Movie, and Final Cut Pro editing software. They will develop a screenplay through different word processing and presentation software such as Microsoft WORD, Appleworks, Power Point, Keynote, and Inspiration 7. They will learn lighting, sound, special effects in filming, locations, and sets. On a learning note, we expect them to develop both traditional and 21st Century literacy skills, sequential thinking skills, critical thinking skills, cooperative learning and collaboration, real world context, and group work skills. We intend to help them learn geometry and algebra skills through digital 3D editing software such as Cinema 4D in which they will be learning equations of depth in making and rendering animation within their production work.

      We will also be doing a compilation of individual writing and editing projects that we call the Teen Magazine. Each student will be responsible for a page of the magazine. They will research any subject affecting teens both locally, and globally utilizing research skills developed for the Internet. This will be another multiple literacy development project with an emphasis on research, reading, creative writing, word recognition, phonemic awareness, graphics editing, and real world context. Both of these core activities fall within the range of ‘Higher Order Thinking’ skill development based on the ‘Complexity of Learning’ from Bloom’s Taxonomy. Through the range of activities chosen, students will also be taught to use technology for interactive presentations. We have found that this directly correlates with improved grades in the classroom where oral presentations are up to 30% of their subject grade. This is especially true in History, Science, and English classes.

      We will also be doing our annual Wilderness Retreat whose prime objectives are Team Building, and Diversity Training. Students will carry out every task in their project teams such as setting up camp, cooking, climbing, hiking, and a map and compass orienteering course. Another objective of this retreat will be to teach Life Sciences in an evergreen forest environment. We will talk about wildlife habitat, eco-systems, geology of a mountain environment, healthy water tables, plant life, and the native people who inhabited this region. We will be teaching both geometry and geography through our orienteering exercise. Students will learn how to read a map and compass and have to negotiate a two-mile orienteering course in their project teams by reading only degrees on a compass and paces in feet.

      Another interesting project of the Youth Institute will be the hiring of ten Alumni from last year’s class who will be coming back to do cooperative peer to peer learning, a community service project with a local middle school, and a more advanced movie making project of their own. We have found that peer-to-peer learning is invaluable in teaching technology skills to children and youth. They learn hands on quicker with smaller ratios, and the Teaching Alumni develop better skills through teaching the skills to others, the highest form of learning according to ‘Blooms Taxonomy’.

      Our community service project will consist of teaching an at-risk remedial middle school class how to do digital storytelling using i-Books, and digital cameras that Apple donated to the school. Apple Computers has personally asked us to help get this in-school project off the ground because they were not getting the success they anticipated with in-school teacher knowledge. We follow the ‘Service Learning Framework’ developed by Devin Hibbard, ‘Facing the Future, People and the Planet’. It puts service-learning projects in this order:

• Identify Curriculum – The study issue/area of focus
• Select a service-learning project
• Develop Goals and Objectives
• Connect to National and State Standards
• Plan for the project
• Develop Pre and Post reflection activities
• Develop Assessment
• Plan a Celebration

      The service-learning definition that we recognize states: ‘Service-Learning is a method of teaching through which students apply newly acquired academic skills and knowledge to address real-life needs in their own communities’. (Aberdeen Service Learning Project / Americorps)

      We presently apply this concept to the Year Round Service-Learning component of the Youth Institute. Up to twenty students per month go out to our CORAL elementary after school sites and teach computer technology skills to younger children through project- based learning activities. They are at each site one month for four days a week. They focus on basic computer skills and graphic arts projects.

      Other activities planned for the summer include field research trips to The Museum of Tolerance that will focus on Diversity Training as well as World History. We will be doing a Tide Pool Life survey as part of a Marine Biology project with The Aquarium of the Pacific. We will also be doing a Life Science project with the Long Beach Nature Center. Students will be doing a video appreciation workshop with The Long Beach Museum of Art as well. This will expose them to numerous types of short films and approaches to film making. The Long Beach Museum of Art has the largest art video library in the world, including a huge database of youth projects.

      We will also be creating individual websites by teaching web design and HTML to students. The software we will be using is Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks. The objective of this activity is to teach students how to create their own media, develop 21st Century literacy skills, creative writing skills, and technology skills all wrapped up into one exercise. All of these components together give the students multiple exposures to real world learning as well as exposure to different experiences not awarded to them in their neighborhoods or due to their income levels. Everything that we do focuses on transferring knowledge to their academic goals and attitudes towards education in general. We aspire to teach them that learning is a fun adventure and that they develop self-efficacy through newly acquired skills and experiences that ultimately lead to self- confidence. This in turn directly equates to better academic performance through improved skills in multiple areas and a more positive attitude towards school.

The Long Beach CORAL Youth Institute is a project of the YMCA of Greater Long Beach. It is funded through a grant from The James Irvine Foundation. Contact person is Bob Cabeza at 562-624-5474 or e-mail at bob.cabeza@lbymca.org