Rummelsberg Diaconia

Power Up is a media education project for children and young refugees living in the residential facilities of the Rummelsberg Diaconia. Over the course of about six months, I conducted a multitude of media pedagogical workshops on location with the children and their caregivers. The project was financed by donations from Aktion Mensch and aims to provide young people a healthy and differentiated approach to digital media.

The workshops were held on a bi-weekly basis, and covered a broad range of topics. As the word workshop implies, I definitely wanted to convey the knowledge in a playful and interactive way. Solely for this purpose we decided to purchase a set of iPads for all participants. This allowed me to think beyond traditional classroom teaching and opened up a new way of sparking an intrinsic motivation to learn! Here is an excerpt of the topics that we covered:

The topics were always chosen in close consultation with the children. This meant that even I learned some new things along the way! Every theory lesson was accompanied by a practical part, which took up most of the time. This was an opportunity for the kids to apply their newly acquired knowledge to their own creative projects.

For example, we did light painting photography, produced our own stop-motion film, filmed and edited a trick shot video, dubbed a movie trailer with self-recorded sounds, analyzed our digital fingerprint on the Internet, wrote fake news with an artificial intelligence, built our own VR glasses and even developed a small video game. The workshops have always been very well received by both the children and the caregivers, and so the continuation of the project is on the horizon.