On Saturday, Feb 18, Mozilla hosted the Toronto Youth Hack Jam. What’s a hack jam? Well, it is an event based on the premise that the web is a collaborative, open, co-building environment. Hack Jams make webmaking and digital literacy easy, social, and fun! Using tools that help make it easy to explore, remix, and redesign, about 50 kids gathered to around laptops and monitors to learn how to make the web.

Hosted at Mozilla’s Community Space in downtown Toronto, the Youth Hack Jam encouraged collaboration and creativity among the dozens of kids (mostly tweens and teens). Participants brought their own laptops and circulated through activity stations that introduced them to key concepts and techniques of webmaking, as well as innovative tools developed by Mozilla and others to empower people to make the Internet their own.

Station activities included using Mozilla’s Hackasaurus to re-tool websites to raise awareness of social issues, programming with Python to create a resource usage calculator, and building an ocean clean-up game using MIT’s Scratch.

Mozilla’s Mark Surman provided his own take on the day:

“One of Mozilla’s biggest opportunities is building a big tent for people teaching web making. This includes teaching things like Hackasaurus and PopcornMaker that we’re building. But it also includes people teaching Scratch, Ruby, Python and even hardware tinkering. We’re all trying to build the same ethos and teach many of the same skills.”

Read more about the activities at the Hive Toronto’s Youth Hack Jam and see how Mozilla is introducing a new generation to creative webmaking!