Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose

After weeks of exploring the surrounding community of Downtown San Jose with digital SLRs, our 7 - 9th grade students have begun putting their photographs together on a timeline in Adobe Premier in order to create a multimedia slide show display of their work. The project will include pictures that they find the most representative of their community and pay the most attention to the stylistic properties of photography, as well as music, text, and vocal narration explaining why it is that they took these pictures and how it demonstrates the San Jose community in order to present a digital youth perspective on the Silicon Valley.

With our older students, grades 10 - 12, we have spent time refreshing everyones mind on the technical aspects of photography and have begun spreading out into our neighborhood. Children's Discovery Museum is located in an interesting and unique place in the city: to the Northeast lies the financial district, made up of many of Silicon Valley's high tech companies as well as restaurants and entertainment; to the south and west are low economic inner-city neighborhoods; and in every direction is the city's homeless population. Over the years, this combination has inspired many students in our program to investigate these idiosyncrasies of poverty amidst affluence, and for Zer01 our youth are doing the same thing with an artistic lens.