My colleagues at the Mozilla Foundation want to "create a web literate planet" and "educate a generation of web makers". Some are working to figure out just what those phrases mean. While others are just going out and teaching stuff.
I signed up to write about web literacy, but keep finding myself pulled back to teaching basic JavaScript programming as a webmaker skill and as a critical thinking skill. (And today's fireside chat about "algorithmic thinking" has only fanned the flames of that desire.)
I've created a very simple JavaScript-based turtle graphics library (and even tried it out on some second graders) and have been pondering some other kinds of math and science explorations that can be facilitated with JavaScript, SVG, and other web technologies. (Nothing published yet; I'll blog here when I've pushed a repo to github.)
So we're teaching webmakers by showing them how to remix websites, create online valentines, and (if I have my way) use turtles to draw pretty patterns. Each of these activities has a way (we'll, mine doesn't yet) to publish the results to a public web page so they can be shared with friends, shown to parents, and so on.
I had a minor epiphany about this today, which is why I'm writing this now. Here it is: we ought to allow junior webmakers to collect everything they publish, as well as the badges they earn, into an online "webmaker scrapbook". It would be like a blog or github for kids, but more colorful and fun.
Having a scrapbook helps with continuity: a young person might start something at one hackasaurus event, and then come back to another and continue it or create a new version of it. Keeping everything together also allows participants to go back and see how much they've learned and how far their skills have grown since they started. And I think the scrapbook metaphor sets a good tone for the collection of works: these are things that a young webmaker should be proud of and want to preserve and remember.
Finally, for kids who like scrapbooking, this idea gives them another compelling reason to learn HTML and CSS skills: so they can decorate their scrapbook in fun ways.
I'm not sure that I'm making any sense here. Your feedback is welcome in the comments!
@__DavidFlanagan
