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The founders of the school say they want to promote work that is strange, impractical and magical. The school’s motto? “More poems less demos.”

“People are coming from a programming background, and thinking, how do I make art with these skills? Things that are whimsical? Dreams?” said Zach Lieberman, one of the school’s four founders and instructors, who has taught at the Parsons School of Design and like his collaborators, has one foot in the technology world and another in the art world.

The school’s first crop of students include both traditional programmers and designers, but also a beatboxer from Canada, and a Ph.D. candidate studying criminal justice who wants to use data visualization to highlight problems in the prison system, said Mr. Lieberman.

“Everybody is heard in our class,” said Leah Postman, 17.

Janae Smith, also 17, said, “It’s made me see my peers as more intelligent, seeing their thought process and begin to understand them on a deeper level.”

Mrs. Olson asked her students to connect “the argument” of the poem they read and the video with their own rally. As the discussion swirled in class, one student typed on the backchannel: “We tend to have the attitude that someone else will do it. But what happens when everyone thinks the same as you?”