This recent Summer I didn’t have time for a much of a vacation because from April to August, I’d been playing the roles of facilities manager, director of technology, principal and teacher.

I recently graduated my first cohort from the Rap Research Lab, a school that I started in the South Bronx focussed on teaching art, design, cultural analysis, media criticism, data mining and data visualization to teens using my project based curriculum that visualizes Hip Hop as a cultural indicator.

Student research projects included: a rapper net worth calculator, a comparison of actual crime rates versus the rate of crime appearing in lyrics, 8 types of definitions found in rap of the “N-word” and the comparison of the sentiment analysis of lyrics from Brooklyn and Compton.

The link to the student research Tumblr with final projects is here.

The assessment of the pilot program is complete and I’m now formalizing what I taught while forming partnerships with organizations that will help make the classroom workflow a more seamless and enriching experience. Next steps are to implement the Rap Research Lab this Spring as a 10 week after school program with an additional instructor in order to begin the process of teacher training. I’m doing all of this with the goal of scaling up and rolling out the curriculum to other institutions.

I’m looking to be connected with people that are receptive to the work I’m doing based at institutions that can provide support.

The student projects were covered on Gawker.

Let me know what you think.

T