MozEd: A MozFest Fringe Event
Over a month ago Mozilla expanded MozFest, into including the Education Community, to create Mozilla Education which is an event dedicated to schools. We had 5 workshops, 8 schools, 150 school children and 9 dedicated volunteers running the event.
The 5 workshops were: Micro:bit Orchestra created by London CLC, a workshop where the children learn how to make music using a Micro:bit by using blockcoding.
Clappy Birds created by A Little Learning, a workshop where the pupils wired up a piezo transducer to a headphone mini-jack cable, and then it plug into a laptop creating an ultra-low budget alternative input to the Scratch programming language. From this the school children were able to wire up a simple circuit, to build a “ScratchBox” and use it to control a port of the cult game “Flappy Birds”, in which the volume of the sound created by their “ScratchBox” will affect how high the bird flies.
A Frame created by Mozilla, a workshop using WebVR to turn 3D models into a virtual reality.
Dance & Coding created by Pell Ensemble, a workshop using Dance to help children begin to understand the language used for coding.
Web Accessibility created by Recite Me, a workshop helping each school group to understand the importance of web accessibility. This was done through getting the children to create their own web page and then testing the accessibility of it.
Alongside the 5 incredible workshops, each child took part in Arts Award Discover, certified by Trinty College London. Arts Award supports children and young people aged up to 25 to grow as artists and arts leaders, inspiring them to connect with and take part in the wider arts world through setting personal challenges in a range of artforms, including digital. To get their award they needed to completed 3 parts: discover, find out and sharing. By the end of the day all 150 children went away with their inductory level Arts Award!
The event wouldn’t of happened if it wasn’t for our partners and sponsors. We would like to thank U Can Too for being our partner in the event, our collaborators Arts Award and 3BM, our sponsor Micro:bit, who gave each student and teacher their very own Micro:bit and our supporter CoderDojo.
Mozilla would also, like to thank all the schools for attending, Adam Buckland, Alice Wyatt, Bhavesh Jadva, Neill Bogie and Saskia Smith for helping out on the day. All our facilitators for taking the time out to run our workshops; Rob Crozier, Rebecca Evans, David Ross, Dave Darch and Chris Turton. Also, too Nic Hughes (3BM), Judy McFall (Arts Award) and Esme Simcox (Mozilla Festival ) for their hard work of being a MozEd Wrangler. Last but not least, Su Adams, MozEd Lead Wrangler, who this event couldn’t of happened without her!
All the children had a brilliant time and we hope that everything they have learnt will be carried on within the schools!
