About
Kidz Connect is a program that connects young people in different countries via media art, performance and collaborative creation in virtual worlds.
The pilot project between students in New York and Amsterdam was held in summer 2006. Students in New York, New York, connected and created with students in Amsterdam, Netherlands, through performance and digital storytelling in Teen Second Life.
First meeting between the NY and Amsterdam students during the pilot project (2006):
Guided by artists and educators from theatre and digital arts, students learned skills like VJ-ing, Playback Theatre, digital storytelling, and 3D modeling. In Teen Second Life, they met and collaborated to build a hybrid virtual city combining aspects of both New York and Amsterdam. Within that common space, they created a performance that occurred both live and online simultaneously.
Documentation on the pilot project can be found on our development wiki and images can be found on our Flickr pages.
In summer 2008, students at the Patel Conservatory in Tampa, Florida, wrote, created and performed a live show with students at the IVKO Montessori School in Amsterdam, Netherlands, learning about each other’s culture in the process through music, dance, digital art and/or storytelling within the virtual world Teen Second Life.
A brief TV report on the 2008 Kidz Connect project:
In April 2009, teens from Huygens College in Amsterdam, visited teens at the Academy of Urban Planning in New York. We took the Dutch teens on a scavenger hunt/tour of lower Manhattan’s historically Dutch spots, including Stone Street, the Netherlands Monument and the site of the former Stadt Huys on Pearl Street and Coenties Slip. Both groups of teens from Amsterdam and NY had been doing projects researching cultural stereotypes, so when they met in real life at the Academy of Urban Planning, it was a great chance to discuss cultural differences and sameness and to take a tour of the neighborhood and Bushwick mural. We plan on continuing this rapport between the students in the form of a continued video dialogue.
Bushwick mural tour - a student guide explains the flames (2009):
Most recently (May 2009), we realized a project with teens from the Macondo refugee community on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria. The project, called Macondo Dance Connect, was a mixed reality performance project that involved bringing kids together from the Macondo refugee community using dance, mapping, storytelling and Teen Second Life.
The objective of the Macondo Dance Connect project was to re-connect youth from the refugee community to their native cultures by allowing them to creatively explore their own history and current living-circumstances and neighbourhood , while allowing them to discover the nature of cultural identity through creative collaboration in virtual space. You can check out photos from the Macondo project on our Flickr pages.
Macondo students on a field trip to see the Cabula6 show:
Upcoming plans include the planning of a Kidz Connect component as part of The Island, which will be an adventure game that takes place simultaneously in the real and virtual world, connecting students in New York and Amsterdam through collaborative gameplay while imbuing historical narratives of New York’s Dutch origins with shared, meaningful experiences as they unravel the mysteries of the game together. This will be part of the Hudson Year Festival in 2009.
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