at the Edgerton Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In collaboration with a new initiative from Austria in Europe, the MIT Edgerton Outreach program is working on a new project, Cineatrix. The original idea stemmed from the knowledge that there is a new generation of children who are digital natives, kids who haven’t known a world without iPods and digital cameras, let alone a comfort level with computers. An MIT student from Austria, Daniel Pressl, is now working on a new idea for the project, Cineatrix. This will combine film, theater and comics. There are two main thoughts to the program.

First and foremost, as a means of story-telling, children will be able to take movies, add special effects to the movies and be able to tell their stories in never imagined ways. The goal for the end of the course is every child will be able to bring a DVD home, to which they have contributed through filming, editing or storytelling.

The second aim is that children, between 10 and 15 years old, get to teach their technological know-how in media and videography to children between 5 and 10. This extraordinary, media-pedagogical concept has proven to show great possibilities and a new way of learning for children and has been running for the past 4 years, in Austria. We run parallel sessions in which the older children are trained on our particular hardware/software to do the filming, editing and other finishing stages, and have the older children then turn around and teach these same skills to the Storytellers, the younger children.