When we kicked off the first annual Civic Innovation Summer here in Chicago, no one knew what to expect. Starting in July, there would be ~150 high school- and college-age teenagers from across the city gathered together every Friday for six weeks in order to learn about technology and open data. Sounds deceptively simple until you start to ask the right questions: Who are these students? What kind of technology do they have access to in their everyday lives? What do they need to learn from us in order to take that next step in their academic or professional lives?
The students we taught this summer were brought together thanks to the Mikva Challenge, which develops the next generation of civic leaders, activists, and policy-makers; and Free Spirit Media, which provides education, access, and opportunity in media production. These organizations had done summer programs with Chicago youths in the past, but neither had experience joining forces to come up with a truly strong technology curriculum targeted at the average Chicago Public School student.
That’s where Smart Chicago stepped in to put together the first ever Civic Innovation Summer (more than 500 images here). Thanks to a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as well as support from the Chicago Community Trust, the Smart Chicago Collaborative was able to develop and deliver an over-arching summer curriculum that would ultimately inspire students to be more curious, try more things, and become technologists in their own right.
