In August 2017, I gave a talk about webVR and Aframe in ARABWIC conference (Arab women in computig 5TH annual conference) which was held in AUB (The American University of Beirut). I was so glad to be supported by Mozilla to attend this great conference. And this is the first time for me to be a speaker at a conference as a Mozilla techspeaker. I gave a talk about webVR and Aframe. Even there were another 4 talks at the same time many attendees were interested in my workshop. I prepared well and I watched Srushitika(lovely indian techspeaker) talk about Aframe and this helped me a lot. I used her slides too. I prepared myself to many Q & A but I haven’t been asked most of the questions I predicted.
I started the session by asking the attendees those questions :what is the VR ? who has ever tried a VR experience? And I asked them about the VR glasses ? if they think creating VR content is easy or not ? if they ever created a VR contetnt? If they think it is easy to create a VR content ? Then I presented the slides explaining webVR and why it is important and what is the friction of the current VR ecosystem. Then, I talked about how it is easy to integrate javascript with aframe. After that, I went to glitch and the visual tool. At the end I mentioned all the resources I know about Aframe.
One of the attendees was an educational method master student she told me that she created her own card board at home by using plastic and water. Before the conference I met an indian girls who live in Qatar, her name is Wafa while we were discussing the conference she told me that she was so excited about the virtual reality session and I was like yaay ! this is my workshop ! 😀
The session was around one hour, I tried to engage the audience, I was feeling inside that I’m nervous but in general I was happy when I finished. I feel I did good.
What makes me happy more, that after finishing many attendees waiting for me to ask me details about the topic, they took pictures with me and ensured that they have my contact info. It was amazing I feel like popular.
One of the attendee told me directly that he liked the session and it is the best talk he attended till now.
Two teachers asked me about more real applied educational examples on VR.
Furthermore, after one day of the session a girl came to me to told me that she loved my talk and she felt that I was very confident while I was talking ! and I was like me ! confident !!!! hahahaha this shows that the nervousness I felt inside wasn’t shown to the audience which is perfect 😀 I was so happy that I asked her to say what she said again and I recorded it. And then I regretted not recording the other good feedback I got. Next time will do.
Till now, many attendees asked me for the slides of my talk.
Unfortunately, it was hard to record the full session of me talking my friend record a very short video for me.
The last day of the conference there were a hackathon organized by the amazing techwomen fellow – Mariam Haydar- for school girls. The teams were competed to create a mobile application to solve a community problem in their country. I helped in mentoring the teams. They built the mobile application using MIT app inventor .
In addition, I gave a talk instead of my fried Ayah Soufan, because she couldn’t make it to Lebanon because of an unexpected problem in her passport. The talk was about the achievement of Arabwic Palestine chapter I gave a formal presentation for 5 minutes.
Also, I attended many other workshops about several trending topics in technology like machine learning and web progressive app. One of the best session I attended was a session called I’m remarkable, It was about giving us a way to increase our self confidence by listing things that we see ourselves remarkable at and saying them out-loud in front of the audience. And yes, I’m remarkable because of many things 😀
I believe that networking and getting introduce to new people is the best part of the conferences.
What I learned from my little experience as a Mozilla tech speaker is that if you prepared well you will do good. It is very important to believe, that your audience want you to do good and that your content is valuable and interesting and you are good enough to give the best presentation. Try to be perfect but don’t worry a lot about it, being good is enough.
Finally, thanks to Mozilla for supporting me going to this conference, thanks to Arabwic for organizing such great conference, and thanks to AUB for hosting us. I enjoyed each moment I spent in Lebanon and I loved everything there, the place, the people and the food. ❤
Yamama