On Saturday 13th June, myself and a handful of intrepid volunteers (huge thank you to Steve, Deb, Brad, Ian, Gavin, and Nathan!) headed out to the Bandwidth Barn in Khayelitsha to run a Mozilla Webmaker event. It was great fun, despite a few stumbling blocks!
The agenda
The course was an introduction to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, using a bunch of things from Mozilla’s Webmaker directory, all ready and ripe for remixing. The plan was that in the morning students would look mostly at HTML and the structure of a web page, then in the afternoon look at fancier stuff with CSS, with a smattering of JavaScript near the end for the very fast students.
The experience levels of the students varied more than we were expecting, so we strayed off the course and into a more computer literacy kind of direction for some students. I tried to put in some extra, real world, activities in to the agenda (cribbed from Training From the Back of the Room).
How the event came together
After some discussion with Baratang (Miya, Founder of GirlHype, Head of the Transformation Portfolio at Silicon Cape, and Business Development Manager at CiTi), we agreed to run a Webmaker event (rather than a Railsbridge or something similar). I spent some time reading and thinking about Mozilla’s Web Literacy guide. That led me on to Mozilla’s excellent Event Resources page, and on to their Medium Event guide (since we were aiming for 30 students).
From there, I went through the teaching kits that they have prepared on their Teaching Activities page, and started to think about making a new remix of activities just for this event. I plowed through the Webmaker directory, started a remix of the Make Your Own Teaching Kit page, and ended up with the course that we ran on Saturday.
And now?
The teachers are going to gather and knock our heads together to discuss ways to make the next one better (like we do for RailsBridge) and make our next event better for the students. The next Webmaker event is already queued up! I’ve agreed to run a workshop for Sihle at Brothers For All at the end of this month. Now to round up some teachers!