Afterschool Program: Mobo Studio

Mobo Studio is an afterschool enrichment program designed to activate kids' curiosity about games, design, and mobile technology. With a focus on digital citizenship and community engagement, Mobo Studio extends Q2L's focus on tinkering, problem-solving, creating, and inventing. Students pick from thematic "pods" that change each trimester and work with expert mentors to learn new things. The offerings focus not only on learning mobile technologies, but also DESIGN and associated skills and literacies. These pods include work around 21st century literacies related to game design, digital storytelling (animation, video, comics, etc.), mobile fashion, branding, marketing, and entrepreneurship. Studio Mobo extends Q2L’s game-based pedagogy into the afterschool space, allowing for direct immersion into communities of production and participation focused on empowering young people and modeling career and college futures.

Digital Citizenship at Q2L
As noted above, Mobo Studio is designed to help students develop design expertise and digital literacies with a focus on mobile creativity. In addition to a focus on producing digital media, students will also engage in explicit conversations about the knowledge, skills, and processes involved in the creation of new media messages. Mobo Studio has outlined a developmental framework for New Media Citizenship, which emphasizes the ultimate goal of our program, to prepare students for a productive career, prosperous life, and civic engagement in the 21st century. Mobo Studio's new media citizenship (NMC) framework, developed by Nichole Pinkard and her team in Chicago, is based on three interrelated dispositions toward new media that together ensure that students will develop and use digital media skills to meet their personal goals and the programmatic objectives of Mobo Studio. New Media Citizens are critical consumers of new media; constructive producers of new media, and social advocates for better futures.

Check-out what happened last year after school at Q2L!

Mobo Studio is presented in partnership with the Pearson Foundation and the Institute of Play.