Here’s what I collected in December. If you come accross anything that might be worth mentioning in this series, please drop me a note, dump it in this pad or even better: drop it on the edu-eu mailinglist!
FSFE Edu-Team activities
We’ve still been working on the NL Edu campaign and restructuring on the education pages on FSFE. If you have any input what can be improved or something you would like to see in this category, please let us know!
Sebastian wrote a blog post about the hackdays and hackathons in Berlin to get young people involved in hacking. The TSB Technologiestiftung provides the Hackingbox which contains
- 12 Raspberry Pis including 8G SD-Card, power supply and case
- 12 Makey Makeys
- 12 Fritzing Starter Kits with Arduino
Some Edu-Team members will meet at FOSDEM. If you are there, please stop by FSFE’s booth and ask!
Community
A post by Shauna Gordon-McKeon that describes how OpenHatch brings Free Software to Campus and how they scaled “in a box”
Sridhar Dhanapalan writes about “Creating an Education Programme”
Here a quick quote as a teaser: Their education programme “highly values teacher empowerment and community engagement”:
“We have a responsibility to invest in our childrens education it is not just another market. As a not-for-profit, we have the freedom and the desire to make this happen. We have no interest in vendor lock-in; building sustainability is an essential part of our mission. We have no incentive to build a dependency on us, and every incentive to ensure that schools and communities can help themselves and each other.”
And another quote:
We provide a copletely unlocked environment, with full access to the root user and the firmware. Some may call that dangerous, but I call that empowerment. If a child starts hacking on an XO, we want to hire that kid.
There were more reports from Sahun (see previous Edu-Posting)
- Best ICT praticses
My Spanish is not good enough, but this post seems to contain the condenced results of the prevoiusly announced event in Zaragoza.Very interesting indeed. I would love to see an English translation of it. And here is even more to it.From the FSF newsletter: The Computer Science Education week was celebrated last month
Government
Edu software
OSS-watch has a nice collection of FS alternatives for education
Article on edulibre that explains how to teach programming by developing videogames with pygame
Report from OLPC San Francisco how they introduced kids to programming with Scratch as they were not allowed to change anything on the computers.
If you already know and like Scatch, you may want to have a look at SNAP!
Distro news
Future events
- Deadline: Jan 10, 2014: students (grade 10-13) may apply for RoboSchool, a 5 day workshop dealing with robotics, in Chemnitz, Germany. (I don’t know how much Free Software will be used there, but as Markus Dittman is involved, I guess FS will be used.)
- Jan 11, 2014: General Assembly of FRISK in Oslo-Trondheim, Norway
- I just learned about it recently and am sorry to report this so late: EducationFreedomDay.org will already take place on January 18!
- Jan 23, 2014: Arduino workshop for teachers in Damme, Germany You’ll have to be a teacher in Lower Saxony in order to participate. But it is cool, that this is being done in general!
- March 2014: /ch/open educational conference in (Switzerland)
- April 3-5, 2014: Robocup German Open (Germany)