I’ve been spending the last two days in this spacy
building you can see on the photo, getting in
touch with 15 year-old pupils. The building has this distinctive “Thunderbirds are Go!” charme
you find in sixties Sci-Fi, but it’s certainly a nice building, spacy from the inside, but still
not to big to make it a huge boring exhibition hall.
being attended by 2500 kids around the age of 15, all with at least some technical subjects at
school. I’m doing 30-minute Subversion workshops here with my colleague Donna. We’re explaining
how Subversion (and version control in general) works to the kids and have some demo machines set
up for them to try it out. The feedback is amazingly positive. The kids understand quickly how to
work with SVN, even if we’re not getting much further than touching the basics (commit, update,
resolve, diff). The understand that SVN is a solution to a broken workflow which is often email-
and/or USB-stick-based. Most of those kids haven’t heard of Free Software yet, but there certainly
are some who do. Moreover, quite a few of those kids have heard of Linux. We have three demo
machines here, one running Ubuntu, one Kubuntu (mine!) and one Windows XP. IBM is kindly hosting
us at their huge stand, so we’re next to “Raving Robots” all the time. I don’t get the impression
that the kids are less excited by subversion, it does make them think about how they work, and how
programming in teams works. There’s also the occasional ‘geek-kid’, knowing Linux, and being
susceptible to Free Software stuff and of course “CodeYard”. For those that don’t know CodeYard,
here comes the shameless plug: CodeYard offers a controlled Free Software development
environment — documented in their mother tongue — and a community for
high-school-aged kids, free of charge. Its purpose is — depending on who you ask in different
order — to make computer science more popular among students, and to raise awareness for Free
Software. It indeed is a good feeling to see those kids making First Contact (HA!) with Linux, KDE and Free
Software, and not being scared. (Didn’t get a single comment about “But I want Windows because I
don’t know this thing” or worse. In fact, it got some of them thinking and asking those questions
that show “I might try it”, otherwise, at least now they’ve heard of it and experienced that it
doesn’t eat their first borns (not that most 15 year-olds in the Netherlands have first borns, of
course). Yesterday, during the idle time you have at this kind of events, I fixed most of the remaining CSS
issues with the brand-new Planet CodeYard, where
we’re collecting weblogs of CodeYarders, today is mostly spent talking to people here.