Festival2012/Submit/WebMakerMentors

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  • Title of session: Supporting Webmakers After Major Events like a Summer of Code Party
  • Your name and affiliation: Tara Tiger Brown, UC Irvine Digital Media Learning Research Hub
  • Session format: Design Challenge

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

A lot of time and effort goes into events focused on teaching people how to be webmakers (program), but what happens after the event is over? How do we continue to support the blossoming programmers and keep the dream alive? A lack of time and resources are some key reasons why fresh skills are forgotten and one of the best ways to retain those skills is to teach others. 1:1, Peer and Group mentors encourage and support learners in their interests, help them create goals, lend an ear when it's needed and cheer them on.

During this design challenge we'll work together to design a mentoring system to help coding event organizers create a mentoring group and webmakers with their skill building and project goals after they have attended an in-person coding event. We can look at an existing online system such as P2PU to augment it or design something from scratch. Any in-person hackathon, hackjam, etc. will be able to implement the design that we come up with.

How do you see that working?

Each teams will tackle one or all of the following: - How do we create the relationships? Organically or explicit matching? 1:1 or group mentoring? - How can the event organizer manage the participants? Can something as simple as an online forum work? Or email? Or does it have to be a big system? - How might the event organizers support the mentoring relationships? Should they do regular check-ins? - Determine how to incorporate achievements to acknowledge accomplishments

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

We can easily break up into groups to answer each of the design questions and add more if necessary.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

Two hours

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

After this Design Challenge session I expect that we'll have some prescriptive ways in which coding event organizers can institute mentoring as an extension to their event once it is over. We'll ask some of the summer of code party organizers (I am one of them) to test out the design.