This past weekend I attended Mozilla Festival in London, and it was incredibly energizing! Everyone at MozFest was so excited about the web, but unlike your average tech conference, there was a much more diverse set of participants, including hackers, makers, journalists, educators, and even lots of kids. The focus of this year’s MozFest was about creating a web-literate world, so I decided to facilitate a session on building your first mobile web app.

Although projects like Webmaker and Appmaker are designed to make content creation more accessible for everyone, I wanted to create some learning materials that could put people on the path towards becoming more serious web developers. This path includes learning the fundamentals of HTML/CSS/JS, as well as how to use the developer tools built into browsers, and popular collaboration tools like Github.

To teach these basics, I made a slide deck that walks you through building a simple stopwatch app that’s hosted using Github pages. At the start of my session, I presented these slides (and of course threw in some Firefox dev tools demos!), but then I let everyone loose to start hacking at their own speeds. There were about 25 participants with a wide range of ability levels, and I think this format worked well to keep everyone engaged (and gave me the opportunity to offer more individual help).

My hope is that other people might find these resources useful, so please use them and share them! Also, because they’re open source, pull requests are welcome :)