YR Media (formerly Youth Radio) engages young people in digital media production that combines journalism, design, data, and coding. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), YR Media collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s App Inventor to launch WAVES — A STEM-Powered Youth News Network for the Nation. This three-year initiative expanded YR Media’s model of informal STEM education through the launch of a national platform that utilizes STEM-powered tools to create and distribute news stories, mobile apps, and digital interactives.
Rockman et al, an independent research and evaluation organization, conducted the external evaluation of the WAVES project. The evaluation offered formative and summative feedback using a case study approach. This report presents a summative assessment of the project’s outcomes.
With an emphasis on making media that investigates issues and tells stories from youth perspectives, WAVES harnessed digital technology to develop young people’s creative license and civic agency. The initiative broadened youth participation in STEM by creating systematic learning opportunities for diverse young people to collaborate with media professionals in producing story-driven, fact-based multimedia that reframes national dialogue on important issues related to science and technology.
WAVES’ pedagogical stance directly addresses the need for meaningful relationships, relevant content, and rigor in STEM learning. YR Media’s approach centers on the exploration of real world issues and problems through media production. Young people are expected to raise questions and observations about actual local, regional, and national issues and to consider the ways that these matters affect their lives and communities. Media projects emanate from questions and investigations that are relevant to youth. Although the expectations or publishing guidelines for media products often originate with educators and audiences, young people exercise free choice in selecting topics and devising plans that resonate personally and respond to events and social issues they care about.
Two key organizational developments of WAVES were: 1) the establishment of a National Network for youth news creating pathways for young people from across the country to contribute to YR Media’s journalism from outside of its Oakland headquarters and 2) the expansion of YR Media’s partnership with MIT App Inventor to produce Youth Mobile Power, a series of do-it-yourself App Inventor tutorials that integrate youth journalism and computer programming.
The National Network’s STEM Desk publishes news reports and commentaries exploring young people’s perspectives on STEM-related stories. Over forty STEM stories were produced by contributors from around the US. Collectively, youth reporters working at YR Media and beyond are shaping national conversations about science, technology, health, and environmental issues that have significance for broad audiences.
The Youth Mobile Power app building guides drew on youth-produced stories as a way to frame App Inventor’s visual block coding program. Each tutorial incorporates a YR Media story that explores how youth are using technology. Users move through a step-by-step process to build and customize their own related mobile app. The tutorials contextualize computer science concepts in youth journalism to maximize student engagement and provide substantive content to anchor computational practices.
WAVES demonstrated that youth engagement in STEM reporting, computational thinking and coding is deepened through critical computational literacy, that is, by participating in digital media projects that respond to real social issues affecting their lives and communities. The public nature of the youth media products establishes authentic audiences and offers tangible examples to pique young people’s curiosity in STEM. YR Media’s “collegial pedagogy,” which positions young people as full collaborators working and learning alongside media professionals and peers in all phases of media production, creates dynamic learning conditions to convert that student curiosity into active investigation and production.
Through the WAVES initiative, young people have realized opportunities to become producers of journalistic media and interactive technology that have impacted the knowledge and attitudes of youth and adult audiences. By adopting and adapting STEM-powered resources developed by YR Media and MIT App Inventor, WAVES’ growing network of youth, educators, journalists, and STEM professionals are participating in a loose coalition focused on mobilizing technology in ways that attend with care and responsibility to not just the market viability of products, but rather, their catalytic validity to provoke social change.
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