We’ve made an annual thing out of doing it every year over the Super Bowl. We have an event called Break the Super Bowl, where kids are looking at Super Bowl ads and then remixing them. Then we throw them back up online, if they’re fair use, in real time. We get a bunch of kids together for the Super Bowl and it looks like a regular Super party. We’ve got pizza, and Doritos, and wings, and soda, and all the junk food. But then they’re all working in teams on laptops, and they’re remixing the actual ads from the Super Bowl that go up that night. We have the game playing on a larger screen so that it has a fun party atmosphere, but they’re actually doing something.

We’ve made an annual thing out of doing it every year over the Super Bowl. We have an event called Break the Super Bowl, where kids are looking at Super Bowl ads and then remixing them. Then we throw them back up online, if they’re fair use, in real time. We get a bunch of kids together for the Super Bowl and it looks like a regular Super party. We’ve got pizza, and Doritos, and wings, and soda, and all the junk food. But then they’re all working in teams on laptops, and they’re remixing the actual ads from the Super Bowl that go up that night. We have the game playing on a larger screen so that it has a fun party atmosphere, but they’re actually doing something.

When we meet up, it’s not like, here’s my proprietary curriculum that you guys can buy from me. We’re realizing that we’ll all do better if we share parts of what we do, rather than trying hold on to these little pieces and sell it or charge for it. There’s other ways that us working together can help us find funding in other places and stay alive, and also be more relevant to the young people that we work with, which is really important.

I was at the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. I was following a lot of the work MacArthur was doing. These two initiatives that they had were the YOUmedia Network, which was a network of digital teen spaces across the country. And they had this Hive thing starting, which seemed more like a dispersed network across cities of organizations working with young people and technology. I became involved in both through my job here at DreamYard. DreamYard was already a part of it when I started. I was really excited to start going to meetings and be a part of Hive NYC. Mozilla joined that effort. I’ve been a part of Hive NYC since 2011 and just immediately fell in love with going to the monthly meetings and connecting with other people working in youth development, arts education, and technology.

We could easily buy technology and put computers in every room, but it doesn’t mean the young people are going to feel comfortable using it — know about the programs that are on the computer, know where to get started, be able to find the YouTube video that could help, and teach themselves that technology is obviously more than just the hardware and software.

The way we approach digital learning is to try to think of using technology as a tool to enhance both the art and social justice.

Think, for example, about the schools who block YouTube and a bunch of other great tools for learning and expression — so youth maybe have access to a computer and internet, but half of it’s blocked from them.