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Youth-Led Tech 2015 By The Numbers

adminAugust 9, 2015

“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

adminAugust 8, 2015

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.

We had a whiteboard:

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

Plenty of room to spread out for projects:

Outdoor space for breaks:

Here’s a full set of photos:

Digital Learning Environments: Christ The King High School in Austin

adminAugust 5, 2015

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.

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

The classroom is equipped with a projector and laptop, great desks, and whiteboards.

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

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

A great cafeteria space and a gymnasium, all on the same floor.

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

adminAugust 1, 2015

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.

The youth were able to make the space their own:

And the parking lot was good for breaks:

See a complete set of photos here:

The 606 Advisory Council converts to Park Advisory Council

adminJuly 29, 2015

Last November we hosted an OpenGovChicago event on park district advisory councils. As OpenGovChicago founder Joe Germuska put it, this was part of our ongoing effort to “learn more about existing microdemocratic systems in Chicago”. More:

In dozens of locations, several times a year, citizens get together to make their local parks and schools better, or to better understand the public safety situation in their beat. We’d like to meet the people who are active in these processes, and also people who would like to participate but are not managing to get involved. Maybe there are ways that software can help these groups gather and distribute information, to learn from their peer councils around the city, and to involve citizens who aren’t able to physically attend the meetings.”

Since that meeting, we’ve continued to help gather and maintain info on Advisory Councils. Here’s a mega-spreadsheet. Many people have contributed to this— please add any info you know!

The 606 Trail is the City of Chicago’s newest park. The park district opened last week after almost a decade of work between the community and the city.

Originally, the 606 was originally a 2.7 mile elevated train line called the Bloomingdale Line that was abandoned in 2001. Train traffic on the line had been slowing since the 1990s and the City of Chicago had brought residents of the Logan Square neighborhood together to propose an idea to turn the train line into a greenspace.

That result of that discussion was the formation of the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail – an all-volunteer organization formed to advocate on behalf of the local community around the Bloomingdale Trail Project. Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail then partnered with The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit, to help bring together a coalition of groups to make the 606 a reality.

Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail is now an official Park Advisory Council.

For more information on how you can get involved in Park Advisory Councils, check out the Park District website here.

Youth Led Tech: Introduction to how the web works

adminJuly 27, 2015

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:

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

Digital Learning Environments: Association House in Humboldt Park

adminJuly 27, 2015

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.

Association House of Chicago at 1116 N. Kedzie Ave. Chicago IL 60651 is a large connected complex of services in the heart of Humboldt Park.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

Association House of Chicago serves a multi-cultural community by providing comprehensive, collaborative and effective programs in English and Spanish. We promote health and wellness and create opportunities for educational and economic advancement.

Service areas include El Cuarto Año High School, a technology center (run by longitme Conenct Chicago member Stephen Pigozzi) with classes in English and Spanish, and a comprehensive Family Literacy Program.

The Smart Chicago Youth-Led Tech program is run from the large cafeteria of Association House. It’s a huge area set off from the rest of the building, which gives us lots of bust-out room for creativity and learning.

There is lots of space to store food, which makes it easier to manage breakfast and lunch five times a week.

The chairs and tables are easy to move. Lots of instruction occurs in presentation and discussion format. We have our own projector.

The Association House partners with Americorps to deliver all sorts of digital skills training.

They run dozens of programs throughout the year:

The enormous park across the street provides lots of bust-out room when it’s time to turn off computers!

Bonus: here’s a video I made of my visit:

Chicago’s Million Dollar Blocks at Chi Hack Night

adminJuly 24, 2015

At this week’s Chi Hack Night, Dr. Dan Cooper from Adler University and Cathy Deng from DataMade presented Chicago’s Million Dollar Blocks – a site that shows how much Illinois spends on incarceration at the block level.

About the project

The concept of a “million dollar block” refers to a project done by the Spatial Information Design Lab that mapped out places where the government was spending over a million dollars on incarceration in a particular neighborhood. It is an adaptation of the original Million Dollar Blocks project, pioneered by Laura Kurgan of the Spatial Information Design Lab and Eric Cadora of the Justice Mapping Center.

This project was developed by Dr. Daniel Cooper and Dr. Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, who had been working to map out the cost of incarceration by zipcode. They worked with DataMade to create a visualization to showcase the costs of incarceration in Chicago and how it impacts particular neighborhoods.

The map the team created was based on data obtained by the Chicago Justice Project from the Cook County Circuit Court (as shown in our Convicted in Cook Project). That dataset shows all convictions in Cook County from 2005-2009 and includes data for what the offense was, the length of the sentence, and the offender’s residential address. The team then based each block’s dollar amounts from sentence lengths. The cost assumption is they used is that on average the Illinois Department of Corrections spends approximately $22,000 per year for each inmate.

Design Considerations

When DataMade built the site, they had a number of design considerations which Cathy Deng explained during the presentations.

1) Value clarity and simplicity

One of the things that the team had to consider is that while it was possible to add much more detail to the site, it would have made things overly complicated. They opted to keep the site simple and focus on the story that the team was working to tell.

2) Design for people who skim

Deng also spoke about the issue of people not having all the time in the world to read every single word on a site. Part of the user experience design was to assume that people would skim through the site. Deng used subheadings and text callouts to make certain points stick out in order to get the most important information across.

3) Make sure it works on mobile

Almost half of the traffic on Chicago’s Million Dollar Blocks comes in through mobile devices. A large part of Deng’s work was making the site look good on mobile devices.

4) Design in the open

DataMade had opened sourced their code on their GitHub site so that other developers can learn from their work. The data that fuels the site was first opened up by the Chicago Justice Project in the context of our the groundbreaking project they did with Smart Chicago: Convicted in Cook. CJP Executive Director Tracy Siska worked hard to obtain that data and this second project helps crystalize the issues we work on in our Justice area of work. Helping encourage more work around liberated data is one reason why we exist.

5) Call to Action

The last point that Deng made was that projects should include a call to action – particularly when the projects are hitting on important social issues.

You can learn more about Chicago’s Million Dollar Blocks here.

Digital Learning Environments: Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros in North Lawndale

adminJuly 19, 2015

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.

Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros at 3415 W. 13th Pl. Chicago IL 60623 is a bustling place with meeting rooms, a gym, a stage, a computer center, a community garden, and a world of joy inside and out.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

The mission of Chicago Youth Centers (CYC) is to empower children and teens to recognize and experience their possibility and promise. Chicago Youth Centers (CYC) is proud to be part of this community. Named after one of its largest supporters, the Polk Bros. Foundation, CYC – ABC Polk Bros. Youth Center was one of the original three centers to form CYC in 1956. Well-trained youth-development specialists give individual support to nearly 400 children and teens each year to help them reach their potential, academically, socially and professionally. The center also runs a food pantry on the first Saturday of each month in partnership with New St. John Missionary Baptist Church. CYC gives members the tools, support and guidance they need to reach their full potential through the following age-specific programs: Early Childhood Education, School-Age Child Development, Teen Leadership Development, and Summer Fun.

The Early Childhood program is of special interest to those of us at Smart Chicago, since we created and run the Chicago Early Learning portal.

Here’s their detail page, and an excerpt:

CYC ABC Early Childhood mission is to invest in youth in underserved communities in Chicago to help them discover and realize their full potential. Our program specialty is in the area of science. Children enrolled in our program will participate in a Green Living Recycling Project to protect the environment. Children will utilize their school readiness skills in all areas inclusive of math, science and literacy as they embark on creating and implementing a recycling station in their classroom community. Children will learn about how packaging waste, including glass, aluminum, plastics, metals and paperboard contribute significantly to annual waste totals, along with yard trimmings. Children will learn recycling involves taking materials that would normally be discarded as waste and giving them a new life. Children will use their problem solving skills to create their own toys and inventions through recycling. Family Engagement in the program supports the involvement of parents and community partnerships toward achieving the school readiness outcomes.

The Smart Chicago Youth-Led Tech program is run from a basement office that is cool and inviting when the hot summer sun is shining bright.

The 24 youth in our program gather around three tables and a bench. We have plenty of outlets and room for our daily breakfast and lunch deliveries. Each of the participants have their own brand-new laptop, which are secured each night in a cabinet we had delivered to the site. We try to be as self-sufficient as possible while using as few of the resources at the location as we can. The gym is a huge resource— the kids love it and they’re able to use it after their morning lesson and right before lunch.