In recent years, a great deal of research and government money has been spent promoting the development of a digital infrastructure to support educational activities of grade school children attending after-school programs in a variety of “informal learning” environments. Based upon several years of ethnographic observations in a digitally-enriched afterschool setting in a poor, mostly African American, subsidized housing center, we have found such activities to be rich sites for understanding the way that youth media practices interact with, and enter into, activities specifically designed to enhance children’s learning through the use of powerful and attractive digital tools. The digital tools in this case included carefully designed simulations and stop motion animation. The activities included learning about parallel circuits as part of a physics curriculum and learning about the ocean and inhabitants as part of a curriculum unit on marine science. This research shows in rather stark manner the ways in which activities emanating from the school and the local cultural norms of the child participants in the after-school setting interact, often in conflictual ways that work against the best laid plans of the elders, while revealing educational potentials from hybridization in the circumstances of the local, after-school idioculture. Fostering participatory culture practices: Practical video production in an after-school program.