Mozilla Hackathon on App and Web Development on 20/03/2015

CMR institute of Technology has come forward to ardently contribute to the open web with a Hackathon on the grounds of app and web development. It was also to create awareness about the open source to the students and a brief introduction about Firefox and its agenda.

The event began with the auspicious lightening of diya by DR. M. Janga Reddy sir, Honorable principal, CMRIT and DR. S. Arvind Joshi sir Head Of the Department, CSE. DR. M. Janga Reddy sir enlightened students with a brief history about Mozilla Firefox and encouraged students to contribute towards the Open web. DR. S. Arvind Joshi sir also encouraged students to actively participate in open web by contributing the ideas from the young minds. He also signified the importance of open web.

The session thereby began with enthusiastic students looking forward to learn and implement new things and Mozilla Representatives showing passion towards helping the students. The session began with HarshaBandaru, an open source contributor and a representative at Mozilla Firefox introducing us to the agenda of the club and importance of the contributors for the open web. The speech was followed by Sai Charan Reddy and Achyuth TVS, also Mozilla Representatives and Contributors introducing the students to tools for the beginners. The tools included “WebMaker”. Webmaker is helpul for people to acquire the basic skills a person requires from browsing web to making web. The tool encourages beginners to come up with their own definition of web and help build it. The next tool was the “Thimble”. Thimble is a web-based code editor. It is designed to give beginners in webmaking to an easy tool to build and share webpages. It gives a perfect platform for not-so-codefreak people to build webpages. The next tool is “Popcorn Maker”. So as the name states, who doesn’t love a bowl of popcorn to a nice movie. But sadly popcorn maker doesn’t make popcorn for u but does help you create your own favourite videos. Popcorn maker helps you to easily remix web videos, audios and images into mashups that you can embed on other websites.

                The next tool was the “X-ray Goggles”. As much as the interesting name, it is an interesting tool to inspect the code behind every webpage. You can see the building blocks that make the websites and then remix into new creations. After the helpful demonstration about the tools it was time for the lunch break. The representatives decided to continue the session after the lunch break.

The hackathon resumed after a brief lunch break. The web development team and the app development team were enthusiastic to learn new things. The representatives assessed the ideas of each group from both web and app development. The representatives split into two team for helping each person understand and implement what they wanted to. The web developers were given tasks to create web pages of their own choice after being taught. The app developers showed much interest in creating a gaming app and therefore HarshaBandaru introduced them to “Constructor2”. Constructor 2 is a powerful HTML5 game creator specifically used to create 2D games. There is no coding required for creating games through this. The students were successfully taught to make a game similar to flappy birds. After the creation of the game by everybody, the representatives announced the competitions for the respective development teams. The teams were given time to create webpages and apps on basis of the taught skills. The students from each team worked really hard. Towards the end of the day and the session, representatives assessed the individual team’s work. Although it was hard to come to a conclusion due to the amazing work by students, T. Kailash, Pradeep Kumar Patri, Shiva and Akhil of third year CSE were pronounced winners for their beautiful and creative design of a webpage.

The day ended with impressed representatives looking forward to work with the students and students energetically looking forward to grasp new things and being more aware than before about the Mozilla Firefox and its open source contribution.