Design Your Event Plan

What does success mean to you? Now that you know what your event theme and your learning objectives are, it's time to figure out what your participants are going to do and make. Here are some guidelines that will help shape the agenda of your event.

 

If these steps don't fit your ideas hack them and tell us about it.

 

Download the Sample Hackasaurus Jam event plan here

1. Hack the Ice Breaker  The Ice Breaker Activity is a way to get people warmed up and thinking about the concepts you're (strategically!) putting forth in your jam. The icebreaker described in the Hackasaurus Jam sample event plan helps participants understand what "hacking" actually means. Adapt the Hackasaurus Ice Breaker Activity "Hack the Robot Dance" to fit with your objectives and theme.
    
2. Plan the Instruction Activity  The instruction activity is the learning lab part of your event. This is the activity that introduces more targeted skills or concepts to your participants. The Hackasaurus "Try on Your X-Ray Goggles" module will show participants how to use the XRay goggles to hack a webpage. Look at the example activity. Hack it to fit with your key theme. Think about how you'll organize groups and facilitate this activity.
    
3. Create a Design Challenge Participants will apply what they learned by making something that requires their new skills. Craft a challenge that sparks curiosity and engages your participants. For example, ask participants to create fictional superhero identities and web assets (websites, content, imagery, etc.) by remixing websites using the X-Ray Goggles. Remix the design challenge to fit with your key theme.
    

Share your event plans here in the Task Discussion and give feedback to 2 others who have posted their plans to the discussion.

 

Alternatively, you can post your work for this challenge on your blog and link to it in the Task Discussion.

Task Discussion

• 

  JeanAustinR said:

  Summer Code Party 1 2 and 3 - Philippines
  
  Our goal is to teach people how to make the web using the tools Mozilla created. With the help of professional web developers, educators and IT practitioners, who are part of the Mozilla Philippines team, we held three Webmaker events beginning with the kick-off date last June 23 until the last week of September.
  
  Part of these parties are workshops were attendees get to make their own pages using Thimble, hack websites through Hackasaurus and learn how to create videos via Popcorn.
  
  Our Mozilla Philippines development team also shared about the basics of HTML5, CSS and jQuery and blogging techniques.
  
  The event is open for everyone. Our audiences were mostly students from universities in the province -- during the first meeting, there were about 10, then 20 in the second and a hundred plus on the last Summer Code Party. And every event we have different sets of students participating.
  
  These events were featured in articles in Yahoo! News Asia [1] , Tech In Asia [2] and Marketing Magazine Philippines [3].
  
  If you would like to learn more details and see the photos, visit my blog reports on my website at http://www.jeanaustinr.com/blog//?s=Summer+Code+Party
  
  Links
  
  [1] Mozilla Philippines Summer Code Party Take Two http://my.news.yahoo.com/mozilla-philippines-summer-code-party-121038419.html
  
  [2] Mozilla Philippines Summer Code Party Take Two http://www.techinasia.com/mozilla-philippines-summer-code-party-take-two/
  
  [3] Mozilla Spins a Bigger Web with Events
  http://marketing-interactive.com/news/34832

  on Oct. 31, 2012, 9:49 p.m.
  
• 

  Jess Klein said:

  Hacking the Holidays Event Plan

  

   

  The "street team" came up with a plan for our hacking the holidays event. We actually tested out a lot of the activities as a group to see if they were fun and also to get a sense of how much time it would take. Since we are only going to have about 3 hours for our hack jam, timing is super important. Some things that we had to block out time for that I wouldn't have remembered on my own was:

  1. Pizza Break- the teens are probably going to be coming to the jam after school so they will be hungry
  2. Bathroom/ breather breaks- nuff said
  3. Lots of mini moments for share out
      

  ICEBREAKER: We decided to let the teens come up with the ice breaker. They split into a few groups in order to brainstorm this. One group did a variation on the Hack the Robot Dance ice breaker and created a Hack Battle. The rules were kind of similar to a "dance off" where one group starts a move and the other has to hack one move and then the first group would respond to that dance move. This was a lot of fun and it was nice because the different youth facillitators took on different roles- one was the DJ (because you need good music to dance!) another was the EmCee and then the others seeded themselves on the different teams so that they could keep up the enthusiasm level in the room.

  Another variation on the ice breaker that one of the groups did was a hacking a board game, where they had to change either :the rules, the players or the board of the game to make a new game. While this was a ton of fun and I think in many ways - a more rewarding experience - it took close to 45 minutes to complete - so as a team we decided to go with the Hack Battle as the ice breaker.

  INSTRUCTION ACTIVITY- We decided that it was easiest to have participants hack something simple first before moving on to a complicated website. We also decided that we should help everyone hack the same page so that it will be easier to trouble shoot when everyone is starting out. So the simple activity is hacking the www.google.com. We will take turns teaching them about different things. As a group, we felt that we needed to contextualize the Hackasaurus project a little--- so Omar and Youssef came up with this video. We might also use this to promote the event:

  

  Click the image to watch the video. We put it up on schooltube so that it wouldn't be blocked by any of their schools that sometimes block sites like Flickr and YouTube.

   

  Another group of our facilitators worked together to make a slide presentation on why it's important to code. This is that video.

  DESIGN CHALLENGE: Since our event theme was hacking the holidays, basically the challenge is for participants to come up with a recipient for their holiday greeting and to send them a holiday-ified and personalized webpage. We think that it might be good to come prepared with some examples of this for inspiration. Since it's a holiday theme- we are going to play music while people hack so it feels festive.

  SHAREOUT- We felt the shareout was super important- so we decided to set up a textthemob board that we can project. This way we don't have to worry about everyone publishing to a blog or something. (Here is a good review of text the mob)

  on Feb. 17, 2012, 9:57 a.m.
  
• 

  Jess Klein said:

  Here is one of the Hacks we did:

  BEFORE

  

  AFTER:

  (click on the image for the link)

  

  on Feb. 17, 2012, 9:25 a.m.
  
  

  eshu9e said:

  guin guin guin penguins

  on April 13, 2012, 1:04 p.m. in reply to Jess Klein