Festival2012/Submit/Programming for the fun of it

• Title of session: Programming for the fun of it (with Waterbear)

 * Your name and affiliation: Dethe Elza, Mozilla Foundation
 * Session format: Learning Lab
 ===What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?===

My session will allow people who have never programmed a computer to become casual programmers using Javascript, by introducing them to Waterbear, a drag-and-drop visual environment for programming.

 ===How do you see that working?===

I am assuming participants either have a computer or that there will be computers made available to them. Waterbear is entirely web-based, all they need is a browser that can access the website. It can be made available offline if needed.

Given the above, I will give a short introduction to Waterbear and demonstrate how to drag blocks together to create a simple animation. I will then present some lightweight challenge problems that participants can choose to solve, or if they have ideas about something they would like to code, they can branch out on their own. I will be available to provide tips and help out if anyone is stuck.

My kids, ages 12 and 16, can also demo some of the projects they've made with Waterbear and help guide anyone who gets stuck.

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

With 5 participants I can offer more support and help and I expect we will get further into the challenges. For 15 participants I will try to have some people who are more experienced with programming (which needn't be very experienced) to help other participants as needed. My kids can help out here. For a group of 50, we can work out the challenges as a group, interactively, with some participants coming up to drag the blocks, and others giving advice to collectively build the solution.

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

I have seen children as young as six write code like this after minimal exposure, so after 20 minutes I expect everyone will have the basic concepts down.

 ===What do you see as outcomes after the festival?===

I think that participants will have programming de-mystified and be more willing to take control of their own computing more. For some, they may go on to use Waterbear to write animation, games, or mash-ups. Others may look at the code that Waterbear creates from the blocks they drag and use that as a jumping-off point to learn Javascript natively. A lot of it depends on how engaged the participants become, but the main goal is to show that you don't have to be a CS major, programmer, or "computer person" to enjoy writing a program.