Dare 2B Digital is an annual South Bay conference that brings 300 young women ages 12-16 together to encourage them to consider STEM fields in college by coming together for a full day of inspiring talks and workshops showcasing women’s work and relevance in technology. For the past four conferences, Lukas has signed Mozilla up as a sponsor and created a workshop that is run 3 times that day and reaches about 80-100 attendees. Last year, Lukas and I created a workshop to teach these girls how to create mobile HTML5 games. This year, Lukas couldn’t make it to the conference because she was busy organizing another great outreach event, so I volunteered to organize our workshop, and I recruited Katie and Heather to help me.

I really love Webmaker, a Mozilla project dedicated to helping people learn how to create amazing things on the web, so I decided to create a workshop to teach the girls how to use some of the Webmaker tools. My goal was to teach the girls how to use these tools to understand the basic building blocks of the web, as well as show them how easy it is to make their own web content. To prepare for the conference, I gathered 20 loaner laptops, ordered some swag, and remixed an existing Webmaker teaching kit to create an outline for the workshop.

We started off each workshop with a brief overview of how the web works (Katie used her teacher skills to create some nice whiteboard diagrams), and then we jumped right into using the Webmaker tools. We started by walking the girls through using the X-Ray Goggles to inspect webpages, and taught them that they can modify what they see in their browsers. We definitely heard lots of “This is so cool!!!” when we showed them how to change text and images on any webpage.

Once they felt comfortable with X-Ray Goggles, we pointed them to a gallery of existing Webmaker projects, and showed them how to use Thimble to remix those projects into their own. At this point, we let them loose to start working on their own remixes, and there was lots of enthusiasm and laughter as they started working on their own projects. We also felt thoroughly out of touch with youth culture when they started filling their projects with images of young male celebrities we had never even heard of.

Unfortunately, we only had an hour and 15 minutes for each workshop, which flew by, but we encouraged the girls to make their own Webmaker accounts to continue working on their remixes at home. They were definitely really excited to learn that all of these resources are available to them at home, and that they only need a web browser to get started!