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When I started as the Teen Services Librarian at the Hancock County Public Library in 2013, one of the first things I noticed about HCPL teens was their love for comics and manga. My desk is located next to the teen room, parallel to our comic and manga shelving. Day after day at 3:30 p.m. teens would flock to that section and take over the entire space in the teen room. Inspired, I started a monthly comic book club and anime/ manga club – which just celebrated its 1st birthday!

During our clubs, teens discuss the respective genres. Many create their own art or have started drawing their own comic/ manga panels. Numerous teens expressed their interest in making comics at the library.

Our library uses the yearly Collaborative Summer Library Program themes, and this year’s focus is superheroes. While planning for Summer Reading 2015, superheroes and villains were dancing in my head. Teen Tech Week, Summer Reading, and the wishes of our library’s teens came together and formed a program plan. The grant funds awarded from YALSA and Best Buy were used to purchase 10-Wacom Intuos digital drawing tablets equipped with comic-making software.

The goal of the Creating Comics program is for teens come to the library during weekly open computer lab hours (Monday – Wednesday, 3 – 6 p.m.) to practice and master creating digital artwork and comics. I staff the lab, so teens can ask questions about using the tablets or the software. Teen Tech Week was a great success. We had eager teens in everyday to work with the drawing tablets, and they stayed the entire duration of the program. A total of thirty-five teens used the drawing tablets during our three-day Creating Comics kick-off. Since Teen Tech Week, we’ve consistently had five teens on drawing tablets daily during open lab. We’ve seen several short comics completed and fantastic artwork. We are also in contact with local high school art teachers and STEM educators who are helping direct students to the library to give as many teens the opportunity to use this new technology. We plan on taking a drawing tablet with us to schools when we do summer reading talks to promote the Creating Comics program.

Between now and June, teens can use the tablets to develop their artwork for personal portfolios and college submissions. They can also start working on their own comics. During Summer Reading (June – July) we will be running a weekly Creating Comics program where teens will collaborate with their peers to create a comic storyboard, characters, and dialogue. Together they will create weekly web-comics that we’ll publish on the library’s teen webpage.  Teens will be learning a new technology, improving their artistic skills, and learning how to work in a drawing team.

These tablets give teens the opportunity to work with technology and software they will encounter in college and the professional world. This drawing lab is the first experience many teens will have to this technology. We hope to reach as many teens as we can who are interested in careers in art, graphic design, or just looking to be inspired.

We are so thankful to YALSA and Best Buy for funding our Teen Tech Week and continuing programs through the summer. This grant has and will continue to make a huge impact on the artistic growth of Hancock County, Indiana teens.

You can follow Sarah and teen updates at Hancock County Public Library on Instagram or Twitter @HCPLibraryteens. Check out our web-comics over the summer at http://hcplibrary.org/teen/.

INTRODUCING PROJECT SPARK – A TEEN TECH MONTH SUCCESS STORY

Last fall the Baraboo (WI) Public Library purchased two Xbox consoles, eight controllers and two large TV screens and introduced a drop-in Minecraft program for our teens.  Not surprisingly, our consoles have been well used.  But we wanted to find other uses for our investment.  Our goal for Teen Tech Week this year was to utilize our Xbox One consoles to offer some sort of digital literacy program.  Research found Project Spark, free software that works on the Xbox One and Windows 8.1.

Project Spark is a digital canvas which can be used to make games, movies, and other experiences.  A player can use the Xbox controller, keyboard and mouse, touch devices and Kinect to create environments, characters, events and story arcs.  Using if-then programming logic, players can design and customize a game down to the minutiae of the in-game object actions, such as dictating the movement of a tree branch every time a specific character is nearby.

Worlds and the created items and objects in those worlds are shareable.  Games can be saved and shared with friends and the greater gaming community if desired.

We asked local video game designer Kent Dance to spearhead five weeks of video game design workshops using Project Spark.  Kent is the creative designer at Wizard Quest, a popular attraction at nearby tourist town Wisconsin Dells.  Wizard Quest is an interactive life-size fantasy experience based on video game designs.

We applied for the 2015 Teen Tech Week grant sponsored by YALSA and Best Buy, and happily our proposal was chosen. We used the grant funds to purchase three Windows tablets that, coupled with our two Xbox One consoles, gave us five work stations for the workshops.  We also purchased an Xbox Kinect sensor bar to give us custom animation and audio input possibilities.  Grant funds were also used to rent a school bus to take us to Wizard Quest for a behind-the-scenes tour, an extremely popular finale to our workshops.

Kent did an excellent job of discussing game design as a career path.  He described his decision to earn a bachelor’s degree in video game design and what teens should be doing now if they are interested in this career.  He highlighted the different skills needed to create a video game and the types of specialists found on each design team.  He also discussed the more serious uses of video games, such as simulation training for doctors, pilots and the military.

We had about twenty participants at our weekly workshops, predominantly male.  They divided into “creative teams” and worked on each week’s challenge.  Completing the Project Spark tutorials, designing a landscape, determining an objective and writing a story arc, and creating a hero and a villain are examples of challenges given during the month.  Participants could name and save their games on the tablets or consoles and build on them each week.

Now that the workshops are over, teens can check out a game controller or tablet anytime and continue to work on their game during library hours.  The Project Spark programmers are now competing with the Minecraft players for use of the Xbox consoles!

When the Teen Tech Week grant was written, it was hoped that we could get teens interested in more library programs. Teens will show up to use the computers to chat with friends and watch internet videos, but mention digital literacy or STEM/STEAM and they’ll look at you like you’re an alien. Don’t get me wrong; our schools are hardworking, Title I schools that strive to teach students what they can. But a rural area of Lafourche Parish is not really at the top of the list for the fast paced information technology industry.

Like any library in the country, we know we have to get them young or we lose them until they’re adults. And without many options they’re not going to stay in this area. The public library still has that stereotypical “the library is where the losers hang out” view to contend with among the teens. Our programming has to be unusual to get them in. We all know video games are always a popular draw. I’ve used free programs like Scratch and Kodu with them before. But the funds and resources to host a large scale video game design program were simply beyond our scope before now.

It’s been a week since we started our Teen Tech Week Game Design Camp and it’s going better than we could’ve hoped for. Nine teens started making their RPG video game the first meeting, and more have promised to join over the weekend to catch up. We have a mix of teams, partners, and independent game designers working away. Most have chosen to show up daily to work on their game instead of spending time on Facebook and YouTube. Quite a few of the college bound highschoolers have asked about degree programs in computer animation and the gaming industry. They had no idea the library was capable of offering so much for them to enjoy. Some of them had never visited the library before. They regret that now.

By the end of the month, we hope to have ten games for patrons to beta test that were designed by our teens. The minimum assignment is to create four maps for players to explore, playable characters, and an enemy encounter. If any of them will have a fully created game by the end is questionable, but somehow I don’t think I have to worry about them not reaching the minimum.

Leaving the library before closing is another question.

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Kristen Angelette is a branch assistant at the Lockport Public Library in the Lafourche Parish System. She works with teen programming, grant research, and graphic design.

Winning one of YALSA’s 2014 Teen Tech Week Grants was both professionally and personally rewarding. It was my second foray into grant-writing and I was surprised that my plan for Exploring Arduino and the creation of a portable STEAM lab at my library branch had won. I was also excited to learn something new, something that “my” kids would think was fun, cool, and wanted to learn too. Of course, with any new challenge, there are degrees of success.

The overall challenge was the timeframe – only five weeks between notification that my branch had won and Teen Tech Week.  Purchasing the equipment – three SparkFun Inventor’s kits and three laptops – didn’t go as planned. All the equipment used in my proposal no longer existed and were replaced by more expensive items. The Inventor’s Kits now available were upgraded, simplified, and cost $10 more each; this was a blessing in disguise as I wouldn’t have to solder anything and preparing the kits involved nothing more than taping two pieces together with double-sided tape. The bargain laptops? I now knew the reason they were such a bargain – discontinued for newer, faster models with greater memory capacity, and nearly double the price. So back to the Best Buy website for a laptop that fit my technology and price needs. Success! And, with the financial and logistical help of the Treasurer of my branch’s Friends, three laptops were acquired in record time. The next challenge was having the laptops ready to go which meant a phone call and email to our library system’s IT department. In four days, IT staff loaded anti-virus and administrative software before downloading the open-source Arduino code. The equipment that formed the basis of a portable STEAM lab was ready!

The burning question – was I ready? The short answer was no, not really. So, I picked up one of the shiny new laptops and an Inventor’s Kit with guidebook and parked myself in the Reference Office. When researching Arduino products, I chose the SparkFun Inventor’s Kit because it’s relatively foolproof, making it perfect for beginners of all ages. Both the red board and breadboard are well-marked, but most importantly the guidebook is amazing. It takes you through 15 basic exercises called circuits – with both written directions and a full-color diagram of a successfully executed circuit. I worked through the first three circuits in about an hour. Surely a group of teens with a desire to learn circuitry and a predilection to technology could complete 10 or even all 15 circuits in two hours!

I had planned to have as many as three teens per workstation in a two hour workshop. I was pleased when six teens registered (five boys and one girl), and momentarily disappointed when only three boys attended. In spite of the numbers, the program ended with valuable feedback: no more than two people per workstation, teens are not necessarily faster when learning new things (they completed five to six circuits in about one hour and forty minutes), they were looking forward to a three-part summer workshop (two afternoons of working through all 15 circuits followed by a third afternoon of experimenting with original circuits and programming), and they really liked that I admitted I was not an expert and was learning along with them.

In late May, I had accepted a position at a library in a different county. I had outlined my intended summer calendar, including a modified two-part Arduino workshop – if I could troubleshoot the basic circuits, anyone could. I heard from a former colleague that the Arduino workshops had been held and that the teens in attendance had a good time, a definite indicator of success. That is what Teen Tech Week is all about – getting teens excited about the convergence of technology, experimentation, and libraries.

Caroline Aversano is the Teen Services Librarian at the Jackson Branch of the Ocean County Library. She had been the Young Adult Librarian at the West Windsor Branch of the Mercer County (NJ) Library from March 2009 to May 2014. In 2007, she was awarded an MSLIS from Drexel University and was inducted into the Sigma Chapter of Beta Phi Mu. Caroline has been a member of ALA, YALSA, the New Jersey Library Association (NJLA), and NJLA’s Young Adult Services Section since 2007; she was a member of NJLA’s Emerging Leaders Class of 2009. She currently serves on YALSA’s Teen Read Week Committee, is in her seventh year of reading for NJLA’s Garden State Teen Book Awards, and is in her third year of serving on the NJ Statewide Summer Reading Committee. Caroline had served as a member of YALSA’s Guidelines for Public Libraries and Reader’s Choice Task Forces in 2011-12.

Prior to becoming a librarian, Caroline held a variety of positions including Assistant Vice President – Marketing Communications for a global financial services provider, Sales and Media Relations for collegiate and minor league athletics, and Quality Control/Quality Assurance for a service provider to manufacturers of composites, gemstones, medical devices, plastics, and semiconductors. These previous occupations provided Caroline with an eclectic collection of knowledge that is infinitely helpful when staffing the Adult Reference Desk.