Liveblog: a Mars landing watch party with school kids - Bert Hubert's writings
a day ago
- NASA's InSight mission successfully landed on Mars, and the author hosted a liveblog watch party for school children aged 9-10.
- The liveblog featured a central webcast, a right column for questions, and a left column for moderator answers, with no sign-on required.
- Peak viewership was 70 simultaneous viewers; dozens of questions were asked and answered, and many kids became interested in science.
- Key features included rapid deletion of clutter, emoji support, and separate input for questions and answers, but lacked image pasting and participant 'snoozing'.
- The technology used open-source software (powerblog) built with libh2o, jquery, SQLite, and other tools, designed for easy deployment and live updates via long-polling.