Welcome to the Youth Zone!

Luca Damasco
3 min readOct 31, 2020

Welcome to the Youth Zone! MozFest, Mozilla’s yearly festival blending art, technology, makers, and society, has opened our call for proposals! This year the festival is all online, and the Youth Zone is looking for young people (and those young at heart) to submit session ideas.

A young boy in the Youth Zone creates an interactive coding project while two educators look over their shoulder.

What is the Youth Zone?

The Youth Zone is a fun, creative, crafty adventure. It’s a Space where young people, students, educators, and creators collaborate to design and share original art, music, games, and stories. Participants can join us to hear from young creators using technology to change the world around them. In addition to sessions, the Youth Zone will also be hosting a beginner-friendly hackathon, where participants can put their newly learned skills to the test!

Since this year’s festival is all online, the Youth Zone team is working hard to create a safe, secure, and engaging space for all participants. This means we’ll be looking for great ways to share facilitator content in safe and accessible ways for all learners.

What Types of Sessions Should I Propose?

The Youth Zone should be a place where anyone can participate. We recommend submissions that use freely accessible tools (open source tools are a plus!) Here’s a few of our favorites:

  • Wick Editor — Make Games, Animations and Everything in Between!
  • Sonic Pi — Code Based Music Creation!
  • Scratch — Block Based Coding Fun!
  • TinkerCAD — Easy to Use 3D Design!
  • MakeCode — Bring Computer Science to Life with Fun Coding Projects!

Workshops don’t all have to be digital! Running a workshop or session that uses inexpensive materials, like a maker arts and crafts workshop, or stop motion and drawing workshop is totally appropriate!

  • Maker/arts and crafts
  • Stop-motion / drawing workshop

Lastly, if your workshop or session uses physical computing or paid software, you might want to consider some more accessible options like:

  • Raspberry pi
  • Makey Makey
  • Microbit
  • Minecraft

Whatever you decide to propose, be sure to note how participants might get access to the tools and resources needed to participate in your session!

A Space Ship Lands in the Youth Zone at MozFest!

A Global Gathering of Young Creators

MozFest participants come from across the globe. We’re looking for young people, students, and educators from all around the world to submit sessions that can captivate viewers, engage learners, and show their incredible talents. Whether you’re interested in sharing work you’ve already made, or leading an educational skill share session, there are a number of great ways facilitators can participate.

New to running sessions? That’s not a problem! The Youth Zone team will be working with facilitators to design great virtual sessions that the whole MozFest community will love.

Have a cool project you’d like to share, a discussion you’d like to have, or a cool skill you’d like to teach to others? Submit your session before November 24th, 2020 at the call for proposals link here.

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Luca Damasco

Luca Damasco likes making things that help people make things. He is the co-creator of www.WickEditor.com.