Newcastle Mozilla Maker Party

Vicky Teinaki -

This afternoon I mentored a group of young people as part of the Newcastle Mozilla Maker Party at the Centre for Life.

These events are happening around the world, and are a means for people (in this case young people) to have a jump start at making the web (or being ‘web makers’ as the slogan goes) using Mozilla tools.

I was part of a group of several adults (Steve Boneham, Tristan Watson, David Easton, Chris Wilde as well as Mozilla organiser Doug Belshaw) helping out on the day.

I’d messed around with the Mozilla web tools a bit before, but was reminded as to how easy they are to use.

  • Hackasaurus is a saveable Firebug or Chrome dev tools in that you can edit any page on the web and make your own link of it. Fun if you want to mess around a bit with news pages!
  • Popcorn maker is basically iMovie meets tumblr as you can pretty much mash up anything available on the web.
  • Thimble is a very nice online web editor (no JS, but very good HTML and CSS including error reporting). However, the power of it (as well as popcorn maker) is that you can remix existing sites, like a very user friendly github fork.

The dozen or so young people at the event ranged from 6 years old (OK, that was Doug’s son Ben) to their teens. I was happy that there were a few girls in the group!

While a couple had done coding at school (Jamie, who I helped, told me that it involved road-tripping from Word … which to be honest terrified me a bit) most hadn’t, which made the ease with which they picked up coding more impressive. I also showed a few of them some tricks with Google Fonts (though it was a bit buggy at times) and CSS3 effects.

The full list of hacks and general course of the day is available over at the Mozilla Etherpad.

One curious thing that I noticed was that a lot of them weren’t that comfortable with using laptop trackpads, particularly right click … which made selecting image URLs difficult. (While a lot of us dev people get around that with keyboard shortcuts, they didn’t use them and to be honest most designers I know don’t either). Certainly what I took from that is that events like these need lots of mice as well as laptops available. I suspect that laptops are starting to be edged out these days between big desktops and tablets.

All in all, I think that the Web Maker project looks to be a particularly powerful way to get people up and running with making the web rather than confusing it. I’d be the first to say that my taking up the web was due to being able to sit next to people who were good at it and learn from them. The ability to remix sites hopefully allows more people to be able to do the same.

(P.S: special mention has to go to Sheela Joy and the team at Centre for Life. After too many years of developer events with terrible pizza, my heart sank when I heard we were to get that as afternoon break food. I was wrong. BEST. PIZZA. EVAR.)