The city of Vadodara got to witness an amazing two day festival where makers from different background came together to showcase their projects. I as a GitHub Campus Expert got an opportunity to have a booth at MakerFest and talk to people about Open Source and various amazing initiatives of GitHub. We meet people of different ages, all interested to know about Open Source and how they can contribute to it. To people starting with GitHub we explained them the GitHub workflow through an illustration we made, inspired from the illustrations from Carlo Gilmar.
We also did various other activities to engage with the audience. We ran a competition for two days in which people were asked to contribute to any projects they liked. We also organized heads-up with some modifications. The words we used revolved around tech. Whenever they came across some new terms, they got curious and started to ask questions about it, this fulfilled our motive. We also had the Octocat Drawing Competition.
I am really happy that I got a chance to do this. I met a lot of people, talked to them and heard their stories. We meet students, entrepreneurs, professionals from various fields, faculties, parents and small kids too. I liked how a few students have started early to learn to code, I was amazed to find a few already contributing to open source projects. I met a lot of students who didn’t even know what open source was. To talk to them, making them understand it, and encouraging them to start contributing felt good. The highlight of the fest was meeting Saanvi Sorathia, a 12 year old girl, who is a YouTube star with more that 100 thousand followers. She has also built few applications that are published on the play store. She was a real motivation.
About MakerFest
MakerFest is the Indian continuation of Maker Faire hosted across America, Europe, Africa and Japan. It is the amalgamation of festivals celebrating the innovators and an art show with booths for inventors, demonstrations, and workshops for attendees. Stretching from every corner of India, Maker Fest is about developing a great maker community where people can learn and share about making. Creators, artists and hobbyists across the country are invited to present their contemporary applications of ideas using the vast ocean of art, science and technology. It is brought to the city by Silicon Valley-based Venture Capitalist and founder of the Motwani Jadeja Foundation — Ms. Asha Jadeja along with Yuvalay ELab and MS University.