We had a good turnout, especially from the Girl Develop It community! It was great to work with those just starting out on the journey to become programmers. We had two sisters from Bolivia - one had graduated in Information Systems over two decades before and was ready to get back in programming. Her sister didn't have any previous experience but was anxious to start learning. :) I loved seeing so many women excited to learn more about web development and anxious to get engaged in open source!
We started out with the most basic tool offered through Webmaker - X-ray goggles. We hacked into Forbes.com and made Charlie Sheen a gazillionaire. We passed around the laptop and let everyone tweak something on the site to see how easy it was to use. We had some good laughs! Everyone was excited to go home and show friends and family.
We moved on to Thimble and even had a make ready to use that I put together real quick. Check it out here. We went over the basics of html and css, how a website is structured and let everyone loose to remix the make. A few people worked in groups, since some didn't have laptops with them. Not everyone saved their work, but if you just do a quick search for "gdi" or "Mozilla Utah" you can see a few of the awesome makes that were created.
There were at least 7 Webmaker accounts created at the event! Everyone seemed pleased with their work. We moved on to AppMaker. Garrett did an AMAZING job explaining the basics of creating apps via AppMaker and how to use channels and connectors to make your app work properly. He explained to clearly and effectively. There were lots of questions! The group was really engaged. One of the attendees was so excited because she had tried to make apps unsuccessfully in the past and now understood how to make it all work.
Some of the comments about the event were:
"Thanks--I really enjoyed this (and great sandwiches btw). Hope there will be more events like it that introduce opensource tools, contribution, etc." - Sarah
" It was great I loved the new tech, app maker, and the web maker! Great bunch of people and lots of great questions and answers." -April
It was an all-around great event that got lots of beginners excited about the free tools available through Mozilla to practice and teach the web. We had 15 people attend and at least 5 seemed committed to contributing to Mozilla. I was so glad that we finally made this event come together. We are hoping to more actively engage with Girl Develop It and other organizations that could use the tools we have to teach beginners about the web! What a great event!
@breanajgonzales reppin' us with the Utah @mozilla two-year anniversary. pic.twitter.com/igtP5er2Vi— Coding Campus (@CodingCampus) February 20, 2015
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