Because it's time to build on what Youth Radio's best known for: producing award-winning media stories by young people for global outlets including National Public Radio, The Huffington Post, and iTunes' Public Radio Player. Given challenges in public education and transformations in media worlds, young people need to be creating the digital tools that determine who knows what, how news travels, and what makes change possible. 

 

Our Lab's approach applies everything we've learned from working with youth to produce stories. That means young people drive the creative process, and youth-adult collaboration is key. Our partners and advisors include developers who've helped create some of the most popular apps on iTunes, a Facebook co-founder, a world-class expert on copyright and Internet law, and scholars working to promote and understand how young people learn -- and how schooling needs to change -- as a result of digital culture.  

 

Here's a video we produced to get the Lab off the ground. At the end of last year, the National Science Foundation added their generous support to this work. Here is an article by NSF, Mobile Action Lab Trains Young People to Design, Develop and Market Apps.

 

 

 

The design process is underway on three apps, each with its own production team. Working with Asiya Wadud's Forage Oakland project, we're building one app that centers on food equity--enabling re-distribution of free fruit in Oakland. Another app promotes youth expression and news reporting through spoken word. We're getting started on a third app that seeks to improve youth-police relations, inspired in part by our newsroom's two-part series with National Public Radio's All Things Considered on child sex trafficking in Oakland, and by our extensive coverage of the Oscar Grant shooting and its aftermath.

 

Our team is creating apps for the iTunes and Android marketplaces, and we're looking into opportunities for ultra-accessible web-based and feature phone projects. Young people are deeply involved in every stage of development. Through Google App Inventor workshops (and with special thanks to Mills College for facilitation and equipment use!), participants have even programmed their own simple apps in a matter of days. 

 

 

While a core youth team works intensely to build apps, the Mobile Action Lab is sponsoring events to expose larger groups of young people to app makers, their processes and products. That's what Youth Radio's Brains and Beakers series, co-developed with Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, is all about. Scientists come to Youth Radio's Downtown Oakland studios to demo their discoveries, methods, and inventions. Students interview the presenters and create media from those conversations. For the December 2010 Brains and Beakers, two of our developer-partners, Nick Kruge and Nick Bryan, showed us how they use mobile devices, failed sports equipment, and even upside-down salad bowls embedded with electronics, to create new musical instruments. 

 

 

 

To keep tabs on the latest from the Mobile Action Lab, check out our blog posts (here, here, and here). There's talk of the Lab on Edutopia, Boing Boing, the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED's Forum, and Science 360. We showcased the work of the Lab at the 2011 Digital Media and Learning Conference in March. Whether in person or online, we hope you'll join the conversation.