Building things is one of the most powerful kinds of learning experiences a person can have: so what do people learn when they build websites using WordPress? The answer depends on what’s in their toolkit.

Content development tools can be designed to help people understand the technical infrastructure of the Web while they build compelling content. One example of such a tool is our WordPress Plugin, Snowball, which helps people build immersive WordPress articles that integrate data and media while exposing them to basic computational features of web development like tagging, nesting, and CSS. We have developed Snowball to support journalistic presentations inspired by the New York Times, including their interactive article “Snowfall” and the more recent “Greenland is Melting Away.”

Our team includes members of Drexel University College of Computing and Informatics, Mozilla Foundation, and University of Nebraska at Omaha and is based at the Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center in West Philly.