Students complete azcentral’s innovation camp

How to maintain a balanced academic and personal life? Want to make smart dating decisions? How well do you know downtown Phoenix?

Twenty Arizona high-school students who graduated last week from

High School Media Innovation Camp can help with all those questions. Just fire up your laptop.

The June 17-29 camp at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication paired students with entrepreneurs, technologists, journalists and professors. The juniors and seniors spent two weeks living in ASU dorms in downtown Phoenix and learned about existing and emerging ways to deliver news content to techsavvy consumers.

“What you have been doing here

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To see a list of the students who were chosen, visit these two weeks is exactly what happens everyday in newsrooms across the country,” executive editor Greg Burton said during student presentations on June 29. “It’s very exciting to see what you’ve come up with.” Among the projects:

❚ An interactive quiz aimed at maintaining a balance between academic demands and mental and physical health. Answers were well reported and databased.

❚ A visual tour of downtown Phoenix with an augmented reality twist that challenged readers’ knowledge of historic places, art exhibits and restaurants.

❚ An online quiz that posed questions about dating do’s and don’ts, taking a serious look at what constitutes appropriate dating behaviors.

Retha Hill, director of the New Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab at the Cronkite School, applauded the students’ enthusiasm.

“Keep experimenting, keep innovating,” she told them. “The world of journalism is broad, there’s a place for the things you’ve learned.”

The Media Innovation Camp is a joint venture with the Cronkite School,

and the USA Today Network. It’s free to students, thanks to

subscribers who donate the value of their print subscription when they put a temporary hold on newspaper delivery for vacation or other reasons.