Sunday 17 November 2013

MozFest 2013

The past weekend has rushed past in another blur... Two of the team were whisked up to London to take part in Mozilla's annual festival at Ravensbourne (a building full of bubble shaped windows and slightly confusing lifts near the O2).



The Met Office invited us along with other hack projects started at their hackathons. We went to take part in the science fair on the Friday evening, to meet new people, to share ideas and learn things; oh, and to spread our love of plasticine hacking!

During the course of the weekend we asked people to create something which they would like to find if they went exploring. This kept them at our stand for long enough for them to ask questions about the project and for us to get them to share ideas about ways in which we could go forward.


The group from Mozilla who were working on localization (making the internet relevant to more people around the world by translating and tweaking it in their native tongue - sounds familiar,) introduced us to a site which offers a more integrated way for translators to work and monitor progress. We've been using GoogleDocs coupled with a hackpad to get our translations done so far, but now we have an account on transifex.com for all who would like to contribute to our localization efforts! You are able to create a new language if yours isn't shown and then start to translate the story in different levels (please make slight changes so that children with the same native language as you will be able to relate to the story.)

We spoke to the Badge The UK team, who are trying to create badges to reward people for achievements on the internet. In the near future we hope to be able to offer badges to both adults who contribute to the translation, content or development of the project and the children and teachers who share their work.



Super-Awesome Sylvia, a 12-year-old inventor and maker from the USA allowed us to borrow her WaterColor Bot to paint the Why? logo for our stand. She was full of ideas and her parents were willing to support her to make them a reality (although, we suspect that without the support she'd have the drive to get them made eventually anyway!)



A teacher from Scotland also came to the science fair and his class have produced this wonderful blog about finding their unicorns. It's great to see a fellow educator allowing their class freedom to explore a topic in their own way, I hope that the ideas planted in their science lessons will grow into a lifelong love of STEM!

The weekend was rounded off with a giant show and tell at the Demo Party. Here, people shared some of the things that were created during the weekend. You can see some of the outcomes from getting together a group of people dedicated to making the internet theirs here on the Mozilla site. 



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