Can we bring high school kids into the Free software development world…

So a little over a year ago I was at my sisters “parents evening” for her last year of high school and I decided to have a chat with my old computing teacher. I figured I would let him know that the local LUG was starting up so he could tell the kids in his class that were using Linux. I was shocked to hear that none of them had even heard about Linux, the open source development model or the founding principals of Free software. However being a geek and not a teacher I had no idea what I could really do about this.

Fast forward to FOSDEM 2009 and the closing keynote by Leslie Hawthorn of Google. She did a most amazing talk about GSOC, Melange and GHOP. Now I seeing this I knew that something could be done about the problem I could see of our high school students being locked into believing that they do not have the right to run, study, copy, modify and distribute as they wished. Yet again Google had the answer

So I pestered Leslie and got some advice about what would be the best way to solve this problem. I logged on to IRC one night and suddenly all of these good ideas were dumped in my lap about how this could work as a classroom project bringing together students from different subjects to work on the same project and how that would encourage working together and give the kids experience of what it is like to work in the ‘real world’ where we all have to work together.

From here I somehow managed to convince my good friend Shelley, who just happens to be a teacher , to come over and hear my crazy idea out. Turns out she is just as crazy as me and loved the idea, FTW! Shelley also had some excellent ideas about how open source development can fit in with the new Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland. Turns out the new curriculum has a lot of the same founding principals as Free Software so this should make things a little easier.

Then a few nights ago I got another update from Leslie with links for more people working on similar things at Teaching Open Source so at the very least we are not alone

Now here we are a teacher and a geek working together with the community, and lots of work there is too!!! So if you are reading this first of all pass the link on to anyone you think might be able to help, this includes parents, people currently in high school, teachers, open source developers and everyone else! Now if you can help directly even better because we are going to need lots of it, drop me an email at rob@lazzurs.net

Lots more exciting things happening with this but I want to get this post out finally so more to come soon.

Take care.