At Hive Toronto, one of our major goals is to empower youth-serving educators to provide digital literacy learning opportunities to their youth. Through our Ca.Appable project with funding from the .CA Community Investment Program, we’re responding to the pressing need in Canada for youth and the educators who serve them to gain web literacy skills through app-creation and app design. This is a need that has been voiced repeatedly by the educator and youth communities we serve.
Based on the feedback from our hackathon with educators, we created teaching kits to make this skill development more accessible to educators and organizations with the end goal of making app creation and app design more accessible to youth.
At Mozilla and Hive Toronto, our definition of educator is purposely flexible to recognize that learning can happen anywhere, anytime, not just in a school setting. These kits were designed to be useful for educators with a range of digital literacy experience, from complete beginners to advanced facilitators. Together, these activities teach core concepts from the Web Literacy Map, specifically “Composing for the Web“, “Remixing“, and “Design and Accessibility” from the “Building” skill strand.
We designed these teaching kits to be valuable for educators in a variety of contexts serving a variety of youth learners including after school programs, youth media literacy programs, libraries workshops and library drop in programs, as we all in elementary and high school settings. All of the teaching kits are free, open, and remixable for educators and the public to adapt to suite their learners. Below is the teaching kit and the main corresponding activities. Go forth and create and remix!
Lo-fi / paper-based activities
- Activity: Align Your Curriculum With Appmaking
- Activity: Mobile App Brainstorming
- Activity: Storytime on the Go
- Activity: Paper Prototyping a Mobile App
- Activity: User Test and Iterate on Paper
Web-based activities
- Activity: Create Your First Mobile Brick
- Activity: Make Music with Appmaker
- Activity: Make a 2-Page App
- Activity: Create a Chef Adventure Blocks App
- Activity: Make a Simple Counter App
We would like to thank the educators who participated in the hackathon and provided Mozilla with valuable feedback. The hackathon, as well as the creation of its resulting teaching kit, has been supported by funding from the .CA Community Investment Program. Through the Community Investment Program, .CA funds projects that demonstrate the capacity to improve the Internet for all Canadians. The .CA team manages Canada’s country code top-level domain on behalf of all Canadians. A Member-driven organization, .CA represents the interests of Canada’s Internet community internationally.