The Mozilla Uganda Community continued to inspire many
through its’ amazing work of teaching the open web.
As 2015 closed down, their latest adventure saw them visit one of the prominent
institutions of higher education in the country’s capital.
Ndejje University welcomed a team
of 6 mozillians in their premises to conduct a one-day workshop whose main
objective was to introduce and train students open web technologies which would
later on see them develop and implement ideas for the open web.
The workshop was organized to
give talks, demonstrate Firefox OS technology (Mobile Operating System), run
code tutorials and hack around open web applications.
in a computer lab looked on, the introductory phase psyched up the audience with a talk on the mobile operating system owned and developed by Mozilla called Firefox OS.
During this phase, the students interacted with the Session Lead as they asked a lot about the uniqueness of the OS and why it stood out in comparison to the existing OS’s in the market i.e. Android, IOS and so on.
During this phase, the students interacted with the Session Lead as they asked a lot about the uniqueness of the OS and why it stood out in comparison to the existing OS’s in the market i.e. Android, IOS and so on.
Apparently, the Mozillians carried Flame devices which ran the Firefox Operating System, they passed them around and each of the participants got a chance to check out the devices and
explore the slik Firefox OS skin and its running apps.
It was then, that a live demo of
a firefox OS app (SaveNotes) was presented, key functionality of the app was
highlighted, the apps’ code base was later distributed to give an insight of
what entails an open web application.
A mozillian demoing functionality of a firefox OS app |
Question from the participants tackled by mozillian |
Mozillian takes participants through code |
With the help and guidance of the facilitators’, every student managed to at least design a web page, Nevertheless majority were able to create a validated form that would register a students’ Name, Number and email address. We then went for a 30 minute lunch break to grab some snacks, drinks and cool off the heads subsequently.
The afternoon got more exciting
for the students as they were getting ready to test their apps in the Firefox OS simulator on their machines, but before that, they needed to create a manifest
file, a file which the Session Lead deemed so important, he said it’s the file
that tells the OS what the app is all about.
The facilitators’ ran around the lab helping the various teams come up
with this file. Soon as they were done with it, they ran the apps in the
simulator.
Participants paying keen attention |
As the workshop came to an end, the
facilitation team came to a conclusion where each mozillian would lead a
category for purposes of mentoring the participants during the idea
implementation.
Workshop Group photo |