Overview
PIC Your Future allows high school students to imagine themselves at UC Berkeley.
Location: UC Berkeley
Year: 2013
Purpose:
In 2013, UC Berkeley’s CITRIS and the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) partnered with UCOP to host a college-readiness hackathon, where students created app prototypes for high schoolers. One winning project, Picture Yourself in College – later renamed PIC Your Future – was developed further in a BCNM course. The web app lets students take selfies and place themselves in UC Berkeley settings (e.g., dorms, classes, social events), fostering a “college identity.” It also includes college-readiness “missions” that break down tasks like meeting counselors or attending fairs into manageable steps.
While we can point to many challenges facing low-income high schook students in applying to college, cultivating a college identity is surely one that is often. How to help them imagine themselves as college students and picture college as a place for them. Given the prevalence of digital photography, photo editing, and image sharing in the everyday practices of high school youth, our idea for a web application centered on the specific practice of students taking a ‘selfie’ (i.e., a picture of oneself and 2013’s Word of the Year). We imagined this to be not only a familiar and engaging experience for students, but also one that could have a critical impact in the development of a college identity. Our project draws from studies in cognitive psychology that demonstrate the power of picturing or imagining oneself completing a task or inhabiting certain social spaces, as well as studies in literacy that explore the kinds of critical identity work and complex literacy learning students engage through digital media practices such as visual storytelling and digital collage. Thus, the core feature of PIC Your Future invites students to take a selfie and replace the background with a selection of UC Berkeley images. To our knowledge, our team is the first to develop an open-source program that can complete this background key-out as simply and as quickly as ours.
In virtually occupying the Berkeley campus, PIC Your Future allows students to move through a year of important Berkeley events, from move-in day and decorating one’s dorm, to attending a social event and participating in Cal Day.
Although not yet fully completed, PIC Your Future also includes a framework for ‘College Readiness Missions,’ where the app directs students to important college preparation tasks or events such as visiting a school guidance counselor or attending a college fair, breaking these tasks down into manageable steps, providing students with crucial resources and information, and maintaining their engagement level with related selfie and digital photography tasks.
Another networking feature would be the addition of a mentoring portal, where mentors or college advisers affiliated with our partnering mentorship program (see below) could provide ongoing online support to help answer student questions, keep them motivated and engaged with the application, and help sustain community focus around issues pertinent to college readiness.
The second additional feature set we view as crucial to the success of the application is the development of tools that would allow students to create and add application content, design missions or college-readiness activities, and become active contributors to the growth of the application and customize it for specific groups or objectives. Adding this feature set occurred to us during the course of developing the application, where we began to realize the immense educational and learning potentials of bringing together a group of students – many of whom did not possess any programming skills – to work collaboratively on the application. Such a feature set also fits into our broader objectives and beliefs, where giving students a sense of ownership and creative input into how they might imagine the college experience and what it takes to prepare for college can make a positive impact on the ultimate success of such an application and educational program, both in its present and future iterations. Students would be able to contribute to the application’s ongoing development and effectiveness in targeting college readiness while also learning vital 21st century skills across multiple disciplines in the process.
Our goal is to develop a robust summer course program with visiting high school students and undergraduates through existent programs offered through UC Berkeley’s Center for Educational Partnerships. This will allow us to recruit from an already active pool of high school students locally connected to the Berkeley campus and draw upon a rich and diverse set of program curricula and activities in both integrating the PIC Your Future project, as well as building in our own curriculum around application design and development. Through faculty affiliated with this proposal from education (Glynda Hull) and the Berkeley Center for New Media (Greg Niemeyer, Director), we will also be able to recruit undergraduates involved in related summer courses as well as students involved directly with the Center for Educational Partnerships to fulfill the role of mentors and course participants.
Researchers and Contributors: The Berkeley Center for New Media (faculty and students), UC Berkeley’s CITRIS and the Social Apps Lab, UCOP. Greg Niemeyer, Glynda Hull.