November 2012 - yCITIES

30Nov 2012 by Mark K No Comments

Greater Boston Meets TED

General

No, I don’t mean Mark Wahlberg’s talking teddy bear. (Though, we could make this a topic for a future blog post;-) This is a long awaited post for me. Two weeks ago, on November 17th & 18th, I attended a series of locally organized TED Talks. TEDxBeaconStreet featured more than 90 talks by innovators, teachers, scientists, businesspeople, thought-leaders, and others tied to Greater Boston. [I was holding off the blog entry until I could share this highlight reel with you.] At the two-day conference, I got a chance to listen to intriguing and inspiring presentations on topics ranging from music & food to science & technology, including one talk about flexible computer chips you can wear on your skin!! Of course, a favorite talk of mine was by given by…

The Teacher Becomes the Student

General

You know how, in certain subjects, it’s really cool to have a teacher who’s also a practitioner? Well, even though I started Youth CITIES 4 years ago after having run the same company I founded over a decade ago, I am back in the trenches. Practicing what I often talk about in the Youth CITIES classes, I’ve combined my experience/background in the videogame industry with my personal interest in raising my young kids to be bilingual. Being a practitioner puts me back in the hot seat, just like all of you who’ve been through the Youth CITIES March-to-May bootcamp. I may have found a valid pain point and what my value proposition is, but I’ve been re-working and refining my elevator pitch over and over again. (It is always much…

Engagement with Enthusiasm

Mini-Hack

For the November Mini-Hack held last week, Youth CITIES was visited by the Events & Logistics Coordinator of the Cambridge Science Festival, Sung Kim. The Cambridge Science Festival (CSF) is a multifaceted event that offers STEM-related lectures, exhibitions, concerts, workshops, and more over a ten-day period at a variety of locations. CSF seeks to make science accessible, interactive, and fun by highlighting the impact of STEM in all our lives. Sung Kim posed the following problem to the students, teachers, and entrepreneurs present: How do we best engage the teenage (12-18) audience in STEM? Throughout the course of our brainstorming, one thing became quite evident – the teenagers who came to CIC to participate in the Mini-Hack needed no extra push or prodding from adults to be fully engaged in…