One muggy Thursday, in a converted warehouse space on the west-side of Manhattan,18 youth hatched a plan to protect the open and spirited nature of the internet from the evil forces lurking in the shadows. By joining wits and skills after school — the fundamentals of code, character creation, storytelling and mixed-media martial arts — this team of youth set out to save their generation from the dark overlords impinging on their rights to rule the webisphere. Their weapon of choice—the design jam!

On June 16, staff from three New Youth City Learning Network (NYCLN) member organizations joined forces @ NYC’s Eyebeam, Art and Technology Center, to collaborate with NYC middle schoolers for an exploration of Super Heroes, the Open Web, and free, cloud-based media-making. Members of Eyebeam, Institute of Play, MOUSE, and NYCLN staff teamed up to “jam” with youth building mixed-media super-heroic hacks to protect ideas, information, and open communication across the net.

Young authors, hackers, inventors and artists geeked their way through four learning stations: prototyping characters, building graphics, remixing web content and posting super-hero creation myths to a collective Tumblr blog.

Each group experimented with the Mozilla-supported Hackasaurus Web Goggles, also a project of the NYCLN, enabling users to view source code for the websites they visit, cache a new instance of the page and repurpose the content. Next, participants mashed up new images, links, and text to create origin stories for their super hero characters, learning the basics of HTML and CSS code along the way. Some embedded their stories into the pages of the New York Times, remixed the Google search page, or bumped top stories from the BBC to illustrate their code-busting feats.

One crowd fave was the super hero Dashhack who uses "electromagnetic bursts to rewrite the very scripts of websites, he defeats evil companies that want to lock down the internet."

The effort was just one aspect of a new league of non-formal learning institutions from across the city who have joined forces to share ideas and resources with one another and the youth of NYC. Learn more about New Youth City Learning Network @ NewYouthCity.org. Keep an eye out for more great opportunities to connect with New Youth City through MOUSE, Eyebeam, Institute of Play, and many other network members in the coming year.

Check out this jam's Tumblr blog, and all of their heroes here.

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