Category Archives: Summer Code Party

Intern skillshare!

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Hi my name is Eddie Hernandez, and I’m a rising 12th grader at Phillips Exeter Academy located in New Hampshire. I’m also a summer intern at Hive NYC.

Recently, I joined Wilson and Zainab–the two other Hive NYC summer interns–for a meeting with the teen interns at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea.

kitchen table webmaking event

Hive NYC Kitchen Table event with Rubin Museum of Art Teens

When the groups first met, neither of us knew what we were in for, but I was sure that we were prepared to share what we had learned. The Rubin Museum, recently joining Hive NYC earlier this year, started off by showing their teen tumblr page. It was created by the interns at the Rubin as a way to “spread the word of the Rubin and also to spread the word of Himalayan art and events!” They had spent the summer posting about the museum’s exhibitions and art works. Some of them didn’t even know much about Himalayan art when they first started posting, but that wasn’t the case when it came to explaining when we came down to visit them: they were full of confidence and exuberance. Besides posting, these interns help out on tours by explaining to museum visitors the many exhibitions that they’ve come to be so familiar with.

The Hive NYC interns, trying to match them, displayed Thimble, which is part of Mozilla’s website full of tools and projects for webmaking. These projects are a way for anyone to learn the basics of HTML/CSS, the code that allows webpages to be formatted the way they are. Some of the projects are mini-games which is what grasped the attention of the Rubin interns the most.

After the brief presentations, the two separated into smaller groups that contained at least one member from each side. These three smaller groups each had different things they wanted to accomplish by the end of the day. I helped one group display music on their  Tumblr page and also learned from the Rubin intern how to make a Tumblr page as presentable as theirs. Wilson helped another group figure out how to make a game based on one of the projects, “Bunny Masher,” that would feature the Himalayan monster “Yeti”. Zainab’s group made an animated gif, which is a sequence of images that are displayed as being animated in a video-like way.

In all, the event was a huge success: the first group was able to display music on the Rubin teen tumblr page as well as teaching me how to make a pretty Tumblr page, Wilson was able to start their Yeti game and they’re going to continue working on it now with the knowledge of being able to code from some of the other projects on Thimble, and finally Zainab helped the interns at Rubin to accomplish creating a GIF of about a few seconds. This experience was like no other in the sense that there was no instructor. We separated into small groups and shared with each other about what we’ve learned during our internships.  Not only was it different, but it was definitely enriching and we hope to do this again in the future!

Don’t Be A User, Be A Maker – by Zainab Oni

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This is re-posted from the Hive Learning Network column on Huffington Post Teen. Zainab Oni is part of the MOUSE Corps and is also a summer intern with Hive NYC. She hopes to go to M.I.T. to study electrical and computer engineering.

Technology isn’t something that I really expressed an interest in until recently. As a matter of fact, the word “technology” didn’t become a part of my vocabulary until I became a student at Hudson High School of Learning Technologies. I started to really notice the involvement of technology in our/my world when my high school informed the students that we were to use laptops as learning tools in classrooms rather than traditional textbooks. I thought my principal was crazy at first (no offense) but as time passed, I became more interested and involved in technology. Using the Internet started to mean more than just social media and it started involving research, online classes and creating and sharing what we made. I started using different tools on the web such as JayCut, Glogster, Prezi, K12, etc.

Since I began to develop interest in technology, I decided to join the MOUSE Squad in my school. It’s a group of students that serve as in-house technicians for the school, helping with daily tech maintenance and troubleshooting wireless and equipment issues. Gradually, I started getting into creating and designing technology, which inevitably led to webmaking. Earlier this year, I was also trained on how to use and teach others about X-Ray Goggles, a web tool that allows people to “hack” or remix a website by letting you see what web pages are made of and then putting in your own text and images. This was when I first started thinking about how to not only use the web, but to start making the web. From then on, I just basically started grabbing every opportunity I could to develop and gather more skills as a webmaker.

I recently attended an event for teenagers and educators called the Hive NYC Summer Code Party, which kicked off with a graffiti board titled, “What Does Your Web Look Like?” We drew pictures of what the web looked liked from our perspectives. I drew a wireless router because that is what stood out the most in my mind (I think it’s because I’ve been having some problems with mine lately). There were a bunch of laptops and other activities too, to help people learn how to code, make webpages, build online games and more. There was a projector in the front of the room and attendees showcased all the amazing projects that they were working on throughout the day, which was also really inspiring for me.

While all this cool stuff was going on, a non-profit called Institute of Play led an activity where we brainstormed and designed two new sports, Dolly Ball and Bowling Chair. Dolly Ball is a sport in which you have six players, three on each team, and a goalie who moves the dolly around. The players have to attempt to shoot the ball into the moving dolly without passing the penalty line. There is a certain line which neither sides can pass. Bowling Chair is similar to bowling but the target is a chair. The chair is placed in front of a line and you have to hit it with a ball to push the chair behind the line, and then do the reverse. Whichever team accomplishes that first wins the game. It never really crossed my mind that you could create your own sport until now, so that was a really eye-opening experience. I think I’m going to try to create more of my own sports with my friends that we can actually play.

The event was part of a bigger effort by Mozilla (the Firefox people) to help “build a generation of webmakers.” Events like the one I attended have been held in Nigeria, Germany, Greece and all across the U.S. I think it’s great that there’s an initiative to teach youth useful skills they can use to create the web. Some people might argue that it is not important to learn things like HTML and CSS, but in a world where we are being introduced to new technology every day and where technology has become a part of our everyday life, it is advisable to not be an ignorant technology user. It’s a part of your world and you don’t want to be blind to what’s going on in your environment. Skills like HTML or CSS are not generally taught in schools today even though having these skills may help you gain an edge when applying for college or looking for jobs.

Since the event, I’ve been playing around with some of the tools I learned how to use and I’ve actually created my own project! I was motivated by the documentary “Bully” and the purpose of my web project is for people to take a stand and make an impact on an issue that they really care about by creating a simple web page about it. Check it out and let me know what you think!

 

Mozilla Hive NYC Summer Code Party quick wrap up

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Wow! Phew! What’s Next?

These are a few of the words and feelings rushing through me right now as I sit in Hive NYC HQ—physically, digitally and mentally unpacking our first Summer Code Party event. It’s Saturday night and we just finished up at Down Town Community Television with Tumblr, Institute of Play, MOUSE  Squad/Core youth and People’s Production House. Of course, we also were heavily featuring the Mozilla Webmaker tools and projects that our colleagues at Mozilla have been working on. It was thrilling and gratifying to see an estimated 150 teens, families, educators, university students and geeks of all stripes hacking, webmaking and networking.

The hive was abuzz with teens as the energy was high and activated.

The event was yet another adventure in the learning experience we call Hive Pop-Ups. Pop-Ups can quickly be described as free-flowing, interest-driven festivals where people and organizations highlight and share their tools, projects and ideas, with a diverse audience. The events take on a flow of their own. Pop-ups are parties with a mission, they are unpredictable, feature a mix of social butterflies/wall flowers and randoms and leave you charged, energized and sometimes tinged with a few regrets.

Hive NYC’s Leah wrapped it up best when she tweeted from the Hive NYC account:

Gr8 educator #mozparty debrief. Likes: teens, energy, interest-driven, stoked audience. Builds: mini-challenges to inspire, small share-outs

Facilitators debrief immediately after Hive Pop-Up

Like any party, even great planning can sometimes go awry! For today’s event, our challenges immediately revealed themselves. Despite rented mobile hotspots, we struggled with WIFI early and often, dealt with short set-up time and early arriving partiers and failed to establish a central broadcast channel to unite the learners and educators in the space. Also while we were able to throw out challenges to the room to respond to, they weren’t as thematically connected or as coordinated as in past Pop-ups. One of the essential challenges in creating a great Pop-up event is finding excellent ways to manage and surf the energy in the room,  inspire attendees and to disperse the crowd towards learning stations with steeper climbs and higher learning curves. In the debrief at the end of the event, many of the facilitators brainstormed ways that projects could garner meaningful feedback and benefit from crowd-sourced ideas when builders felt stuck.

But enough with the woulda-shoulda-coulda! Here are my quick reflections on what I thought was awesome about today!

  • We had an incredible turn-out from Hive NYC orgs: The Point, NYSCI, City Lore, Real Works, AMNH, Tribeca Film Institute, The Rubin Museum, The Bronx Museum, and Parson The New School for Design, ALL had educators and youth at the party joining their fellow networkers.
  • Inventive responses to spotty Internet by participants. We had our “What is the Web to you” exquisite corpse mural, our Remix Facebook design session, Hive NYC T-Shirt Hack, a Decode the Code html Pictionary activity and the Gamekit Design-a-Sport challenge.  Greg Trefry from Institute of Play had 15 participants in a back room inventing a sport that used balls, chairs, a moving dolly and the walls to design a sport—big shout-out for getting that together!
  • How incredible the Webmaker tools are. From the X-Ray googles, to Thimble and Popcorn Maker. Today’s Summer Code Party cemented that these and other web apps to come will transform how we teach/learn and enact digital literacy.
  • People’s Production House’s Pop Squad. The Pop Squad is a team of youth Popcorn Maker designers, filmakers, evangelists and facilitators. They bring a sense of fun, experimentation and levity to the events where we have worked together. I really think PPH is building a model for how youth can teach youth skills with seriousness, timely political tie-ins and fun.
  • The image of whole families coming together to the event to spend a Saturday afternoon hacking and playing! One Pop-Up volunteer called these groups the “Swiss Family Robinson of the 21st Century!”
  • Cohorts of teens from existing Hive orgs and projects using the Pop-Up as a way to continue to work on and develop their stuff. We saw Tribeca Film Institute youth continue to enhance a video on gun violence they are producing with web features via Popcorn Maker and many groups who use Tumblr their to deepen their skills and further trick out their blogs.

I would like to leave you with an example of what I think is the Mozilla Webmaker/Summer Code Party ethos and essence. One of our partiers, Daniela, spends her time making zines and building a coalition of other female Latino zine writers and designers to use the medium for empowerment, community-building and communication. She explained during her share-out that she came to the Summer Code Party Pop Up to finally learn enough about Tumblr and coding to turn her passion for this work into a blog so she could share it with a bigger audience. Here is what she was able to build this afternoon: Poc Zine Project. During the Pop-up she thanked us all for the opportunity to connect, learn and finally upgrade her skill set.

This is why we do it people—and we’re in it, to win it.