Mozilla, the folks who brought you Firefox, have released another project that aims to teach a generation of younglings how to create stuff on the Web. It’s called Hackasaurus.
While kids uses social media sites like Facebook, they might think of themselves as consumers rather than creators. Hackasaurus aims to show kids of any age that they can participate in building the Web, too.
The idea is very simple, starting with a tutorial. You click a button to start “X-Ray Goggles”, a JavaScript program that lets you peek at all the elements on webpage. It works a bit like the popular Firebug plug-in. Better yet, you can tweak them. You can even get down and dirty with HTML and CSS if you want. The tutorial has you replace a graphic with Serious Cat.
You can also share your remixes with the Internet, as well as get the raw HTML so you can tweak it even more. Here’s the result of me following the tutorial.
In addition to the button, you can install it as a bookmarklet, so you can remix any webpage you want, creating quick-and-dirty parodies and sharing them with your friends.
It’s a fun way to learn how HTML and CSS work, and perhaps more kids will graduate to more advanced Web authoring techniques. In any case, it will help demystify the way the Web works. Teachers can also download lesson plans to use in their courses.
If you like this, you might want to check out Codeacademy, a site that will teach you how to program. Since this is a Mozilla project, why not check out our list of 25 Firefox add-ons for Web developers?
