{"id":13863,"date":"2015-10-02T11:23:41","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webmakerblog.wpengine.com\/?p=13863"},"modified":"2019-02-26T12:40:19","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T20:40:19","slug":"how-i-got-onboard-with-ridewme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/mozilla-learning\/how-i-got-onboard-with-ridewme\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Got Onboard With RideW\/Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi! I\u2019m Marina Malone, and I’m a high school student from Chicago Public Schools. This post is about my experience with RideW\/Me<\/a>, which is an app that makes it easy for high school students to find educational opportunities in Chicago and get there safely. It’s produced by members of Mozilla\u2019s Hive Chicago Learning Network<\/a>, Mozilla staff, volunteer developers, and other interested community members just like me!<\/em>
\n

\"IMG_1574\"<\/a>

That’s me on the left with Esteban Martinez and Amaris Alanis-Ribiero.<\/p><\/div>
\nIt all started when my College First<\/a> program manager at the Chicago Botanic Garden, Amaris, sent an email\u00a0looking for students to help out with some app about transportation for teens. She was vague about exactly how we could help with something like app development and only said that we would be \u201cworking with tech experts,\u201d which sounded intimidating. When I walked into\u00a0TechNexus<\/a>\u00a0and into what turned out to be a civic hacking competition<\/a>, I was right (but only at first). I was confronted by a bunch of old people \u2013 college students and guys with beards \u2013 writing on whiteboards and typing on keyboards. I had never been in such a board-centric room before and it made me wonder even more how I, a board-less high school student, could fit in an environment like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\n\"IMG_1575\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Fortunately, my friend Esteban also volunteered to help with the\u00a0app and even though I still had no idea what the app specifically did, Esteban had arrived before me and caught me up. He told me that our job was to make the diagrams on one of the whiteboards pleasing to the eye using Google Slides; they were calling them storyboards, a rough draft of what the app would look like. The sloppiness of the storyboards on the whiteboard actually made them seem a lot friendlier. They were filled with phrases like \u201cCoOL Urban Scene,\u201d \u201cIm In If Ur In\u201d and other obvious attempts to appeal to teens. It made the team we were working with more relatable, rather than distant computer geniuses. But words like \u201cMy Events,\u201d \u201cFind Events,\u201d and \u201cJoin Event\u201d caught my eye. I thought this app was about transportation, so what was going on with these events?
\n\"DSC_1309\"<\/a>That\u2019s where Robert Friedman<\/a>, a Mozilla educator stepped in with another whiteboard. He explained that the app, called RideW\/Me<\/a>, would make it easier for teens to find educational events and get there safely with people they know. His explanation cleared up what the app was about, and I realized that it actually applied to me, my friends, and my school.
\nChicago is a huge city, with a lot of educational opportunities that are often completely missed out on because nobody knows about them or it\u2019s difficult to get to them. Understanding the goals of the work and how it was relevant to my personal experience gave me a reason to contribute as much as I could to this project… even if all I could do was make the diagrams on the whiteboard pleasing to the eye on Google Slides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"ridewme\"<\/a><\/td>\n\"slideshow1\"<\/a><\/td>\n\"slideshow2\"<\/a><\/td>\n\"slideshow3\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Turns out, making diagrams on whiteboards pleasing to the eye isn\u2019t as simple as I thought it would be. Esteban and I were delving into the realm of graphic design for RideW\/Me but it felt like we sort of hit a wall when we finished the basic storyboard in Google Slides. We could only do so much with simple rectangles and Google\u2019s choices for the color green. That\u2019s when Robert introduced us to Ricardo Vasquez, a User Experience and Interaction Designer at Mozilla to help us understand how designers think and work. Ricardo is a graphic designer and he happened to host a YouTube livestreaming series called \u201cHour of Design\u201d <\/a>where he walks viewers through his process of designing something for the web.
\nRicardo wanted to dedicate an episode or two of his show to RideW\/Me. To help him in his work, he asked Esteban and me to create a mood board. A mood board is an arrangement of pictures that\u2019s used to demonstrate a certain style, and, in this case, we made them to represent the look and feel of the app. We made two: one a bit formal and mute, but the other gritty and loud. Now I was finally getting a hold of a board of my own!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"mooooooodboard\"<\/a><\/td>\n\"bandaidsandskate_board<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

On the livestreams<\/a>, Amaris, Robert, Esteban, a bunch of my friends, and I watched Ricardo do his magic on YouTube and communicated with each other, remotely, through Slack<\/a>, which is a collaboration tool that basically combines Twitter and Facebook. He created a style guide that provided choices for color palettes and font sets, and he taught us how certain colors and fonts were perceived by people. Instead of making one absolute choice of fonts and colors he made two or more for people to vote on. There was an incredibly heated battle on Slack about going blue and red or blue and yellow for the app. Personally, I was Team Ketchup, Team Mustard is lame! We actually polled a bunch of people about the color palette, and we found out that kids tend to like blue and red, while adults like blue and yellow. At the end of the day, we learned how important color choice and fonts are when it comes to connecting to our intended audience for the app.
\nAt the end of August, I attended a Chicago Hack Night<\/a> at Merchandise Mart, which was another environment filled with more whiteboards and keyboards. There were all sorts of people there like web designers, GIS experts, college students, community leaders, and even lawyers, and the main thing they had in common was that they were ready to collaborate with each other. I learned about Code Academy<\/a> there, and through Code Academy, right now, I\u2019m learning to use the command line.
\n\"IMG_3595\"<\/a>
\nYou really can\u2019t work alone with a project like RideW\/Me. A project made for a community is most successful when it\u2019s made by the community.<\/strong> Input from a variety of people is key, and the Internet has made it so much easier for us to get connected, from little things like asking my friends which color looks great on green through Facebook, to awesome stuff like getting an actual graphic designer from Canada collaboratively making a style guide with us through YouTube and Slack. The web is a hub for collaboration, and it can be used to find people who genuinely want other people to succeed. The web really \u2018does make things that feel so distant and unachievable, like high school students helping tech experts, feasible after all.
\nA few months ago, I was a student who was overwhelmed by how board-centric the RideW\/Me project was, and now, I feel like I\u2019ve got a lot under my belt when it comes to boards. I\u2019ve worked with storyboards, created mood boards, and now I\u2019m typing on the keyboard to learn how to code. All of this is because I\u2019ve met great people in person, and through the Internet. I never thought I\u2019d be able contribute much to the RideW\/Me app, but I underestimated how much our community cares about youth.
\n\"IMG_1565\"<\/a>
\nWhether it be tomorrow or in five years, you can find me writing on whiteboards building on RideW\/Me or another community project. As a part of this great community, I want to be the best I can be to help others be the best that they can be. I’m currently involved in conservation biology at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and from my experience I have been inspired to improve the natural environment of my peers. I plan to apply what I learned from the Garden and with the RideW\/Me project to improving the biodiversity of prairies in the United States.
\nRead more about RideW\/Me in this post<\/a> by<\/em> Christopher Bohl, <\/i><\/a>web developer and recent graduate of <\/i>Dev Bootcamp<\/i><\/a> Chicago. <\/i>
\n<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi! I\u2019m Marina Malone, and I’m a high school student from Chicago Public Schools. This post is about my experience with RideW\/Me, which is an app that makes it easy for high school students to find educational opportunities in Chicago … Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[378228],"tags":[330394,383603],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13863"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/foundation-archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}