Cirrus@Austlit

This unit offers students the opportunity to engage in the playing and production of new media texts for children and adolescents. Computer games, films, television programs and websites are in direct market-share competition with more traditional texts for children like books and comics. In an increasingly new-media dominated environment, it is important to understand the different operations of these texts as both objects of entertainment and as vehicles for ideological agendas.

This unit invites students to test these criteria with the option to work creatively as well as analytically. Assignments involve analysis of a range of new media set texts including an interpretation of political and cultural schema as they are presented within these new formats. Students will also have the option to submit a creative pitch for a new media text for children (this can be purely written and conceptual or it can employ student skills/specialities in computer game or film/television production).