Hacking the Holidays- Peer to Peer Jam at Mouse

Yesterday the Hive Mozilla Youth Ambassadors ran their first event as facilitators. The hack jam was held at the Mouse headquarters and we had a nice mix of youth, adult "squad leaders" and adult program coordinators from the Mouse staff.

The youth facilitators came a few hours early to prepare for the event and do a walk through of the event plan. There was a lot of set up work to do, including: making a screen for the projector (see below), putting out the chairs, making sure the X- Ray goggles bookmarklet was installed on all the computers, and checking that the laptops were fully charged. This was a bit tedious, but we referred to the "IT Checklist" included in the Hacktivity Kit for pointers.

Before the event started, we paired off and role played "worst case scenarios" and facilitated them. We had a lot of fun pretending to not know how to navigate webpages!

Finally, event participants arrived and we kicked things off with a welcome and the "Hack Dance Battle" icebreaker. Zainab acted as emcee for the youth jam and thanked everyone for coming. Youseff then promptly asked everyone to get our of their seats and to get their groove on with some hackable dancing. (Neil dj-ed and we played a LOT of the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell song) Omar lead the group discussion about what we mean when we say hack.

We then showed the two videos that the youth created on the topics of "What is Hackasaurus" and "Why You Should Learn to Code." Check out the REMIXED video that Omar and Youssef made here.

Jose gave a great demo on how to use the goggles, pointing out the importance of looking for opening and closing tags when editing html. The first hacking challenge that everyone participated in was hacking the google site. The youth facilitators broke up the participants into groups and tag teamed on the facilitation. Then, the youth did a shareout:

It was really great to see the youth teaching the adults how to code:

The final challenge of the day- "the moment you have all been waiting for," as Omar announced- was "holiday-ifying" any website of your choosing.  After an hour of break outs, hacking, and full on merriment, we had a group shareout. Participants messaged the text the mob site that we put up for the event, with their new websites:

Here is one of the hacks:

After the event was over, and we cleaned up the space, we held a team meeting for the youth facilitators. We debriefed the event, and discussed what went well- the icebreaker, the videos, the holiday challenge- and what we would do differently- time of the event, and dedicating more time to the practice mini challenge. Finally, I gave the youth who completed all the workshops, including this peer facilitation event- their cerification:

Overall- I would say that the event and the Hive MoYo Ambassador trainings were a success. I will follow up on our next steps in iterating this process in another blog post- but I leave you with a team photo. Special shout outs go to Marc Lesser and Meredith Summs of Mouse for hosting and being involved in all of the workshops: