Last July 26, the Mozilla Philippines Community traveled all the way to Olongapo City, a then-US Naval Base city 84 miles away from Manila, to have an awesome Maker Party with students of Gordon College. With me in our team are Mozilla Reps Tina Verbo, Faye Tandog, Kemuel Domanog, Aaron Cajes, Firefox Student Ambassador Marcus Ang, and new MozPH volunteers CK Luna, Red Prudente, Roger Duran, Mikko De Vera, and Jeff Soriano. This event is the first time that we have included Firefox OS in our Maker Party, which made it really challenging on our part but thanks to these volunteers who came with us, we managed to make the event a huge success.
The event formally started as Faye Tandog, Mozilla Philippines Community Manager, oriented the attendees about Mozilla and what we are doing to protect the open web. After she discussed the Webmaker project, I did a demonstration of Webmaker tools and got amazed reactions from the attendees, especially on Appmaker. I showed them how simple it is to create an open web app that they can easily share and install to any Firefox OS phones and Android phones with Firefox browser. As the audience already have knowledge on building web apps, Aaron Cajes showcased Firefox OS before the end of the session. We were also surprised that they will use Firefox OS as a platform for their thesis!
On our second session, Aaron continued his discussion about Firefox OS and talked about Web APIs. As the students were having their hands-on– installing Firefox, installing the Firefox OS simulator, and testing their apps in the simulator– Aaron discussed every important codes that will help the participants. Some attendees encountered some problems on this part of the Maker Party, but with the aid of our mentors they solved each problem instantly.
After the long discussion about Firefox OS, students presented their pre-made apps, and we loved each of their ideas. We were really amazed that in that early age they managed to develop useful and intelligent apps. Some of those apps are:
You can view more photos here.