Thats a wrap! PASE Explorers 2014
The PASE Explorers Program is a three-year program designed to provide young people with a S.A.F.E. (Sequenced, Active, Focused, and Explicit) afterschool experience by engaging youth in discovering the strengths of their own neighborhood and giving them the opportunity to explore and learn about the strengths of another neighborhood. The Explorers Program promotes neighborhood and community exploration, which helps children to see the larger context of the world in which they live. Through activities such as community mapping, interviewing, oral and written presentations, creating a website and reflection exercises, this program helps young people build skills essential for life-long success including critical thinking, technology, teamwork, creativity, and communication. The PASE Explorers program will expand the reach and scope previously offered through PASE’s Brooklyn Explorers Program by supporting other boroughs, working with more afterschool programs and offering more capacity building support services. – Partnership for After School Education
NOTE: This is the third generation of this program. It went from “Nets Explorers(2012)” to “Brooklyn Explorers (2013)” and now “PASE Explorers (2014)”
Youth from New york Junior Tennis & Learning PS 37 present their website to Explorer participants at Queens PASE Explorer Expo, June 3 2014
Hive NYC just wrapped up another successful year working with Partnership for After School Education(PASE) on a project called PASE Explorers. The program ran from January to June and included a series of educational trainings, curriculum building, skill development and site visits to afterschool programs in NYC. As technical consultants on the project, Hive NYC was responsible for teaching youth and adults from 18 after school organizations how to build websites with a suite of web building tools called Webmaker. These tools are free and open source. They provide easily accessible lessons, resources and templates that teach fundamentals of building websites using programming languages like HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Map of PASE Explorers sites 2014 – Created by Hive Contractor, Patrick Weaver
This year, 18 afterschool sites (which grew from 6 afterschool sites last year) were chosen from The Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. These sites applied to participate through PASE and received a suite of resources to implement the program. Hive provided several days of technical training with the Webmaker tools, 2 visits to each after school site (36 visits in total) and troubleshooting throughout the project. In preparation for the site visits, high school students from MOUSE Squad were trained in Webmaker and joined Hive as technical assistants during visits. This gave MOUSE Squad teens the opportunity to practice their HTML and CSS skills by teaching it to (slightly younger) PASE Explorer youth.
Final website by Queens site Goodwill Industries, Beacon 109 (Queens Village)
Each after school program was responsible for producing one website using Webmaker Thimble that showcased the work they did during the Explorers program. Often, youth at each site broke up into teams that would tackle certain tasks. For example, one team would be responsible for building the website, another team would be responsible for media, another team would be responsible for Popcorn videos, another responsible for writing, etc. This method of breaking up tasks gave all youth participants a way to contribute. Adults from each site provided guidance to assist their students as they created the websites.
This five month program culminated in an exposition for students to showcase their projects. At separate times, participants from Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn came together to presented their work and share their experiences. Here is a short, cross-borough mash up of the presentations they gave.
This was made possible with the help of our fabulous assistants, Patrick Weaver and Rita Geladze. They brought skills, enthusiasm and innovation to make this program successful. Here they are at an amazing Maker Party called Maker Prom:
Rita Geladze and Patrick Weaver, PASE Explorers assistants 2014
For more information please see the detailed timeline of the program here. If you have further questions please contact Hive NYC @hivelearningnyc on twitter.
