Twenty young music makers have spent the past week creating electronic music and videos at The Ark in Dublin's Temple Bar. Tonight, you can pop down to Meeting House Square and see (and hear) the results. Jim Carroll reports

FOR the 20 youngsters gathered around tables and iBooks on the top floor of The Ark, this is a summer camp with a difference. The DEAF Junior workshop aims to cover the basics of digital music and film-making and will see these would-be producers spend a week pressing buttons, flicking switches, banging the swish Roland V-Drums and filming in various city-centre locations to create tracks and videos with a difference.

The workshop is a collaboration between the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF) and The Ark, Temple Bar's cultural centre for children, and all the places were snapped up within two hours of going on sale. What the DEAF Junior participants produce during this week will form part of the D1 Recordings showcase at the last of the summer's Urban Season events in Temple Bar's Meeting House Square tonight.

While many seasoned digital music producers might baulk at the idea of concept, creation, production and high-profile public performance within five days, the DEAF Junior youngsters, mere novices to a boy and girl when it comes to this game, don't appear too concerned at the imposition of such a deadline. Indeed, at the end of the first day, the instructors seem flabbergasted at what the children have produced after a few hours using Apple's Garage Band software for the first time.

"They have picked everything up so fast," says DEAF's Karen Walshe, while The Ark's Michael John believes that the group are at least a day ahead of where they thought they would be, even at this early stage. To D1 Records producer and course co-presenter Donal Tierney, the speed and comprehension is proof of the "touch and click" abilities of this generation.

For the participants, it does all appear rather easy, as they use the software to juggle and jiggle various samples to create tracks. While some tracks are more succinct and cohesive than others, all display great dollops of imagination. Whether it's the bubbling electronic track which 12-year-old Ministry of Sound fan Cian and his group have produced or the somewhat demented Drop Dead which the rockier Mutant 5 are honing in a corner with help from former Pogue Cait O'Riordan, one of the course volunteers, these kids are picking up the musical pieces with little difficulty.

To go with their tracks, each group will also spend time discussing, creating, storyboarding, shooting and editing a video using iMovie and Arkaos software, under the guidance of Tierney and Delicious 9 animator Eoghan Kidney. It's a chance for any budding Michel Gondrys or Spike Jonzes in the room to let their imagination run riot with a top-drawer digital video camera in hand - budgets, locations and props permitting - and already, there are some elaborate plots being drafted for these clips.

The eagerness of all concerned to get their hands on the equipment and to start putting down their own melodic markers is apparent. Some have already decided just what will be their DEAF Junior highlights: 11-year-old Phoebe is looking forward to the actual videoshoot and getting her hands on a finished DVD of her work at the end of the week. Phoebe, like the vast majority of the other participants, never had an opportunity to be so hands-on with music-making software and hardware, yet always harboured a curiosity about how her favourite acts, such as Avril Lavigne, produced their music.

According to DEAF's Walshe, this is just the start of the electronic festival's plans to dovetail its activities with the education sector. Next week, the DEAF Junior workshop moves to Dublin's Fatima Mansions, where another group of children will use the hardware and software to get their sound and vision down on hard-drive.

Once schools re-open in the autumn, Walshe hopes the success of the DEAF Junior workshops will allow them to take the concept around the city and the country to show other children the nuts and bolts of making digital music and video.

"What we'd like to do ultimately is to put it all online," Walshe explains. "And to have a digital music e-learning facility so children could use it regardless of where they are based." Such a development will require a considerable outlay of time and money, but Walshe believes the results will more than justify the investment.

The workshops are part of an ongoing series of events bringing DEAF-curated electronic music performances into Temple Bar. The highlight of this summer's collaboration between DEAF and Temple Bar Properties was the major outdoor events featuring Irish and international electronic acts performing in the heart of Temple Bar as part of the Diversions programme, proof indeed that electronic music can inhabit that space between the nightclub and the concert hall.

While Walshe cites a few minor problems (including limitations on the volume to placate residents in the vicinity of the square, and the wonderful Irish weather, which has provided the atmospherics for every event), she expresses satisfaction with how the outdoor shows have gone to date. Given their apparent willingness to go electronic, it may now even be time to forgive the fact that TBP would have been better served had they supported electronic music many years ago rather than housing and promoting such oddities as Arthouse.

Back inside The Ark, the next generation of music producers is making its case for funding and promotion in the future. While not all of these kids may wish to go on to become fully-fledged music or video producers, they'll have discovered not only what technology can do, but just how important imagination is when it comes to making music and film.

• The DEAF Junior videos will be screened in Temple Bar's Meeting House Square from 8 p.m. this evening as part of the Urban Season