Build Bridges: A Science Fair for Open Learning
DML Conference 2014
Thursday, March 6
5:15 — 6:45pm  
Oval & Venetian Rooms at the Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston
Cocktails, snacks, mingling and exploring

What is the DML Science Fair?

The Mozilla Science Fair will help kick off this year's Digital Media and Learning 2014 conference at the Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston. It's interactive, fun and totally hands-on -- like a big "show and tell" session or demo party. Participants wander, sip cocktails, chat with exhibitors, and get their digital hands dirty on cool projects ranging from research, learning models and web projects to software, experiments, and anything at the cutting edge of learning and digital media.

About Mozilla

Mozilla is a global, nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Web better. We emphasize principle over profit, and believe that the Web is a shared public resource to be cared for, not a commodity to be sold. We work with a worldwide community to create open source products like Mozilla Firefox, and to innovate for the benefit of the individual and the betterment of the Web. The result is great products built by passionate people and better choices for everyone.

Survival Guide

Context:

The Mozilla Science Fair on Mar. 6 is a massive “show & shout” highlighting the most promising projects at the intersection of learning, freedom and the web. It's a welcome party for the DML 2014 conference, with a chance to meet all 500 participants and the press.

By hosting a table at the Science Fair, you get to put your project's best foot forward and demo exciting technology. With each interaction, think about how you can deliver more value to participants.

This is not a trade show or a marketing conference. Rather, it's a collaboration-loving, participant-driven learning fair dedicated to building tools that help people and address real needs. How can your project help others achieve their goals? How can you invite people to get involved? For that reason, the role you play is a delicate balance.

As a Science Fair host, you become a living and breathing resource (you!) who will answer questions and give a face to innovative ideas. But mostly, it's about having fun!

Check out video from last year's Mozilla Science Fair at DML

Science Fair Exhibitors

Join us for a cocktail reception and get your digital hands dirty! Over 20 exhibitors from Hive Learning Networks, Make Things Do Stuff, and MIT Media Lab will share projects that exemplify connecting practices across disciplines. Come mingle and meet the people, projects and ideas that build bridges using open learning principles.

List of Exhibitors

BadgeKit - Mozilla

• Mark Surman (Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation) will be announcing the launch of BadgeKit at the Science Fair. This station will be a good place for people to test out the new toolstack, provide feedback and get questions answered.

Codemancer - Important Little Games

• A fantasy game that teaches the magic of code and the fundamentals of programming to a broad audience. This station will have a working demo with for participants to play and explore!

Pterosaurs: The Card Game - American Museum of Natural History

• A new card game about pterosaurs designed via a DIY web-based card game tool that incorporates elements of augmented reality. This is a collaborative effort between an afterschool youth program, the museum exhibition department, game designers, and science educators.

The Things They Carried Interactive - National Veterans Art Museum

• Inspired by Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, this exhibit serves as a visual companion to illustrate the narrative with fine art and photography from veterans that lived the stories in the novel. This interactive site for the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago seeks to allow anyone to access and explore The Things They Carried exhibit, and provide a deeper understanding of the experience, sacrifice and historical significance of what these soldiers carried -- physically and emotionally -- during the Vietnam War.

…And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Badges: Forging a Chicago STEM Pathway Across the US - Project Exploration / C-STEMM

• Interact with experiences developing and implementing a STEM digital-badging ecosystem for non-formal learning environments in Chicago. We will center on a hands-on, interactive metaphorming activity to invent the I-80 for digital badging. Come and re-imagine pathways, build bridges between cities, and move youth and communities to amazing new places.

Open Badges Pathways - Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation + Mozilla

• Mozilla's Open Badges and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are creating a Discovery tool -- a directory of badges connected to career pathways -- with content developed in collaboration with industry partners. With a primary audience of pre-college youth, these pathways will link to specific learning experiences and career goals. At the core of the project is the idea that there are different types of pathways, and that these can be personalized to meet individual learning needs.

4th Floor - Chattanooga Public Library

• The 4th floor of Chattanooga Public Library in Tennessee is a public laboratory and educational facility with a focus on information, design, technology, and the applied arts. The 12,000+ ft2 space hosts equipment, expertise, programs, events, and meetings that work within this scope. While traditional library spaces support the consumption of knowledge by offering access to media, 4th Floor is unique because it supports the production, connection, and sharing of knowledge by offering access to tools and instruction. This station will have demos and descriptions of the activities that take place at the library.

Code Club - Code Club, UK

• Code Club is a volunteer lead after school coding club for children in elementary and middle school. We send volunteers into schools to teach Scratch, HTML/CSS, Python etc. Our lesson materials are tried and tested, free and open source :)

NYC Haunts - Global Kids

• Global Kids will showcase NYC Haunts: youth-created augmented-reality games about neighborhoods in New York. We will engage in a dialogue about best-practices from our experience expanding this program to new formal and informal learning settings. We will also demonstrate how to use MIT’s new software, TaleBlazer, to design and play a geo-locative game.

Build in Progress - MIT Media Lab: Lifelong Kindergarten Group

• Build in Progress is a platform to document and share your design projects as they're being developed. We showcase and celebrate the trials and errors that naturally occur throughout the design process!

Unhangout - MIT Media Lab

• Unhangout is an open source platform for running large-scale online un-conferences for community-based learning instead of top-down information transfer. Think of it as a classroom with an infinite number of breakout sessions. Each event has a landing page, which we call the lobby. When participants arrive, they can see who else is there and chat with each other. The hosts can do a video welcome and introduction that gets streamed into the lobby. Participants then break out into smaller sessions (up to 10 people per session) for in-depth conversations, peer-to-peer learning, and collaboration on projects.

Curiosity Machine - Iridescent

• We will showcase the Curiosity Machine, an online website that contains over 80 of Iridescent's open-ended design challenges. Each activity inspires kids to be more creative, curious, and persistent through the act of building and creating. The website is free to use, and offers the opportunity for kids to be virtually mentored by professional engineers as they build.

GreenTECH Specialist Badge & App - MOUSE

• MOUSE will demo activities and an app from our new GreenTECH badge. GreenTECH utilizes new technologies, including Webmaker tools, to encourage making, experimenting and remixing, while learning about earth-friendly technology. The app allows students to perform energy audits and experiment with ways to reduce a school’s carbon footprint. While it was developed to accompany GreenTECH, it is open for anyone to use.

StoryScape: Transmedia for Everyone - MIT Media Lab: Affective Computing Group

• StoryScape is a platform that allows anyone to create highly interactive illustrated digital stories that can cross into physical assets and environments.

Webmaker + Hive Learning Networks - Mozilla

• Level up your web literacy skills with Mozilla Webmaker! See how the web works and remix any website with X-Ray Goggles and Thimble. Or learn more about Hive Learning Networks and what it takes to start a Hive in your city.

STEM Stars - YWCA Greater Pittsburgh program and Carnegie Science Center

• Check out how the STEM Stars help girls improve academic achievement! This collaborative project removes barriers, increases opportunities, and prepares young people for exciting STEM career exploration.

Arts Greenhouse - Carnegie Mellon University

• Experience an impromptu music recording! Arts Greenhouse is a free hip-hop education and music technology program for teens. Come see what the kids have made. (All tracks will be compiled and made available for download.)

Remake Learning Digital Corps - Hive Pittsburgh/The Sprout Fund

• Activate digital literacies for youth! The Digital Corps is a network of makers, educators, community members, and students working to demystify programming, investigate privacy issues, and pair mentors with teenagers. We will demonstrate our learning tools, training process, and Hive Pittsburgh community resources.

Digital Learning Day - Kansas City Public Library

• Come see how we’ve engaged youth through making activities! Share best-practices with us, and learn about the new Gigabit Hive efforts.

Sarah Heinz House - Media Lab

Before the event

Tech:

• Prepare documentation and promotional materials you want to share with participants. The DML 2014 conference brings together super savvy learning geeks as well as educators, students, and funders who may not be so familiar with technical jargon. Think about different audiences and how your project will be useful and accessible to these groups.
• Please try to keep your project demonstrations offline because the WiFi will be shared. If you are showing a project that requires Internet access and cannot be shown offline, we strongly suggest that you bring your own dongles; however, we may have a few mi-fis available.
• Any other technical requirements we should be aware of? Again, we may not be able to accommodate everything, but letting us know in advance helps. If so, please email melissa@mozillafoundation.org.

Logistics:

• Register. Please be sure to fill out this Google form to ensure that you are registered as an event exhibitor.

Signage

• You will get a sign with your project name and URL. Please set up where your sign is.

People and Program:

• Take a look at the DML 2014 program and list of who's coming to start charting how you'll craft your message to these participants.

At the Science Fair

Timetable:

• Doors open and kick-off of the science fair at 17:15.
• Wrap up by 18:45. Please take all your equipment back with you.
• Drinks and snacks will be served during the Science Fair.

Equipment:

• • Power outlets might be hard to come by depending on your position, so please try to bring your own or charge your devices beforehand to make sure you're ready to go! That said, we are hoping to get one power strip per table, but err on the side of caution just in case!
  • Plan for 500 people seeing your stand. Bring enough materials to spread the love.

Don't be shy!

• Everyone will be milling about, meeting new people, exchanging ideas. Smile, jump in the mix and enjoy yourself!
• Don't forget to share your experience on Twitter using the hashtag #DML2014!

If you have any questions that were not answered by this Wiki, please feel free to email melissa[at]mozillafoundation[dot]org and we'll get back to you.