Mozilla Webmaker’s Thimble Receives “ON for Learning” Award

By Mozilla’s Webmaker Team

We are thrilled to share that Thimble, our code editor for beginners, has been recognized by Common Sense Media as one of the best educational tools online with the 2014 ON for Learning Award. The awards celebrate the year’s best in digital media products designed to educate and engage young people, and have become the most comprehensive tool that parents and teachers rely on for understanding the true educational value of digital media resources.

The award was announced at a ceremony in San Francisco yesterday featuring 50 other educational apps, games, and websites singled out as game changers.

Thimble also received a 5-star rating from Common Sense Media for its educational value — the highest possible rating available from the organization. A few highlights:

• Engagement – Kids experience the delight of learning to write their own webpages with side-by-side windows that instantly show the effects of their coding tweaks.
• Learning Approach – Authentic coding practice comes alive through fun, community-generated projects. Whether they learn through guided remixing or start a project from scratch, kids can find the right entry point into web design.
• Support – Immediate feedback, baked-in help, and a supportive community all help kids persevere and publish their webpages.

It’s Webmaker’s goal to help people understand the mechanics, culture, and citizenship of the web. We created Thimble, along with X-Ray Goggles and Popcorn Maker, to provide free, open source tools that help educators, technologists, makers, and anyone move from consuming to creating the web, in a way that enables creativity and encourages empowerment.

We’re honored to receive this award from Common Sense Media, and really want to thank our Webmaker community for making Thimble what it is today, and continuously working to help make it better. Whether you playtested the earliest version created by Jess Klein and Atul Varma (remember the Love Bomb?); provided feedback about later iterations on an open community call; filed or closed bugs; created or remixed content for others to use and learn and share… we’re celebrating this award with and for you!

Photo Courtesy of The Mozilla Blog

Join Chris Lawrence, Senior Director of the Webmaker Community Team; Jeffrey Knutson, Senior Editor at Common Sense Media; and educators who are using Thimble with youth and adults for teaching and learning as they discuss the affordances of this web-authoring experience during an Educator Innovator webinar on April 10, 2014, at 4 p.m. PDT/7 p.m. EDT.