One of the most exciting things about Maker Party is guiding people learn, and then have them immediately use that learning to guide someone else. Last week, 13 Webmaker mentors did exactly that: after 2 days of fun but intense training they went to a local school and ran 3 back-to-back Maker Parties with over 120 high school students, aged 14-17.

Ciudad del Este sits on the “triple border” of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Although the official language of the country is Spanish, many  here are fluent in Portuguese and the indigenous language of Guaraní — and actually, the Mozilla Guaraní community will launch “Aguaratata” — Firefox in Guaraní — next year. Being able to offer our tools and training in different languages is no easy feat on our journey to supporting more web makers, but it is a step our team is taking.

This training was held in Spanish. We started at 8am on Saturday morning with sweetened coffee in one hand and post-its in the other, and shared the qualities of mentors we’ve had. The next two days were filled with spectrograms, no-fi activities for when the power cuts out, and loads of paper prototypes. The mentors critiqued activities and added their own flair — like using Guaraní commands when “programming your robot” to reinforce local culture — and designed traffic apps that took the weather into consideration so you can avoid flooded streets in this Amazonian town. We finished up the trainings with bowling in the evenings, competing for one of the coveted Maker Party t-shirts.
Monday morning we went to Centro Educativo Municipal where the mentors moved the tables in the library/IT room into groups and eagerly awaited the first group of 90 high school students. To have more space for the starting introductory circle, half of the group went outside; but to keep the spectrogram especially chaotic and fun, we brought everyone inside! Shortly thereafter, X-Ray Goggles were installed and the hacking began: Paraguay’s Ultima Hora news website quickly changed from serious reporting to a hub of dog gifs and news about the school.
 
After each session the mentors gathered to debrief and revise their plans. They quickly learned that if they were thirsty or had a sore throat after the end of a session, it was because they were talking too much. Student-centered learning became the goal of the day, and they boasted about how little they needed to drink water, despite the incredible heat! At each closing circle, students expressed what they’d learned — some learned for the first time that the Internet is not just for Facebook, while others expressed an interest learning more about what lies beneath the pages. No doubt the Paraguay mentors have many more events up their sleeves, and we look forward to hearing about them!
Resources:

• For more photos, visit this flickr album.
• Training event teaching kit (Spanish).
• Etherpad from Maker Parties at CEM.