Rummelsberg Diaconia
Power Up is a media education project for children and young refugees living in the residential facilities of Rummelsberg Diaconia. Over the course of about six months, I conducted numerous media pedagogical workshops on-site with the children and their caregivers. The project was funded by donations from Aktion Mensch and aims to provide young people a healthy and differentiated approach to digital media.
The workshops were held bi-weekly and covered a wide range of topics. As the word "workshop" implies, I definitely wanted to convey knowledge in a playful and interactive way. 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 to spark intrinsic motivation for learning! Here is an excerpt of the topics we covered:
- Dream job YouTuber
- The make-believe world of Instagram
- Fraud and scam in mobile games
- How does the internet work?
- Data privacy in the digital age
- How to create your own video game
- The history of filmmaking
- Copyright and right to one's own image
- Press and freedom of expression
- What information is trustworthy?
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 component, 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 footprint on the internet, wrote fake news with artificial intelligence, built our own VR glasses, and even developed a small video game. The workshops were always well received by both the children and the caregivers, and so the continuation of the project is on the horizon.
