Making & Science

Making & Science is a Google initiative, inspiring and encouraging young creators to become future makers and scientists worldwide. Toaster was asked to develop a website that engages curious minds, promotes the Science Journal (an ingenious app that helps collect data from the environment), and fosters a connection between students and teachers.

An engaging website that hosts fun activities and content designed to provoke their curiosity; features the Science Journal; and allows students and teachers to connect, collaborate and share their experiences via the Forum. The creation of the website was a real team effort between Google and Toaster - with the result being a brilliant responsive website full of animations and parallax, translated into more than 40 languages.

The website makes use of leading-edge technologies, such as the highly anticipated Polymer library and custom elements to create autonomous UI components. We chose to make the site a Progressive Web App to provide a native experience, whilst Service Workers ensure the site can be viewed both online and offline. The website is fully accessible for everyone - colour contrast, focus and even screen-reading are a few examples among many we thoroughly tested to make the application all-inclusive.

The Science Journal app ran successfully for several years under Google before graduating to Arduino in September 2020, with Arduino taking over stewardship of the free, open-source app on both Android and iOS. The makingscience.withgoogle.com website remains live, continuing to serve as an educational resource through Google for Education.