On Saturday, January 28, 2017, we had an event planned at Northern India Engineering College on Activate Mozilla Campaign. Our aim was to cover WebVR track under Build the Web activity.
The event was scheduled from 12:00 PM IST to 4:00 PM IST.
I reached the venue at 10:40 AM and helped a bit with arrangements. Saturday was a day off for all college students, so honestly I didn't expect much audience.
But, I was wrong. Students are more willing to learn and soon there were lot of students. In starting there were less people, but then we got a total audience of around 70+ which is huge considering that it was a holiday for them and they just came here to learn about FOSS.
Unfortunately, out of the core-organizers, only Shivam was available. But we got support from other student volunteers to do various arrangements and co-ordinating all the sessions smoothly. I would take this opportunity to thank each one of them.
Since, there were no other speakers, I had to take all the sessions. It began with an interactive session on what students understand by the term FOSS (Free & Open Source Software). I told about how Free Software and Open Source Software are same yet different from each other.
After this we discussed about Mozilla and the Open Web. Since it was Data Privacy Day, we also discussed about how important is privacy in the online world, yet most of us don't have proper information on it. We also discussed about Free Basics and how various organizations keep track of our online identities; and how Mozilla as an organization is doing in protecting the Free Web.
Next session was on Introduction to Git & Github. Although focus was on Activate Mozilla campaign, but I really wanted to teach about Version control to people considering that most people are Engineering students.
After this we had a small break to let people grab the knowledge they just had. I was surprised by the enthusiasm of these students. In the break time too, many of them surrounded me with various questions like how to contribute to FOSS, how to start et. all. So, yes, it wasn't a break for me ;)
After this session, we jumped on to Activate Mozilla Campaign. We told about various tracks under Activate Mozilla Campaign. The session was kick started with an introduction to Virtual Reality. We discussed about Visual and Input Immersion and how it is changing the Web as we use it today.
After this, we jumped on to learning A-Frame and making Virtual Reality scenes.
Then we gave time to audience to try using A Frame to develop something. I will collect all those projects and post them here soon :)
In the end we distributed swags to students.
After the event, we took feedback from people. Some of them are here:
Out of these, I'm astonished to see, that 100% people want to learn more about it. One student wrote that he would really like if more simpler terms would be used. Surely, I would keep this in mind, and if someone told me this thing during the session, I would've helped them there itself. But I'd surely take care from next session.
And there is some MozLove on twitter as well :)
Now, I'm flooded with a lot of mails from students who're willing to contribute to FOSS and requesting for guidance. I have started replying to some, and will be replying to all of them soon.
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