Any one here has any experience with teaching 8 to 12 years old kids Linux?
Teacher here.
My favourite “lesson” I ever gave was in a grade 9 technology class. It was a pretty small class, about 10 kids. I split them up into two teams and made a competition. They chose their own teams — it ended up being boys vs girls. I never would have made it that way on my own but that’s how it worked out.
The school had a bunch of old, decommissioned PCs that were headed to the junk yard. I sorted through all of them to get two exact sets of working parts for the competition.
The goal of the competition was to recover a jpeg from one of the hard drives. Each team had a computer with the ram removed and two hard drives. One was blank and the other had the jpeg on it. They also had a Linux Mint installer on a usb stick.
I don’t remember exactly how I had set it up but it was points based, something about getting to different stages first. Like 5 points to be the team that turns the computer on first. One of the big ones was that they got an extra 10 points if they did the whole thing without a mouse.
I told the other classes about the competition and asked some other teachers if it would be okay for them to watch and cheer on. It ended up being the nerdiest and most exciting class ever. Students were literally cheering each team through a Linux install. One team got stuck and had to pull out the mouse. There was booing. It was so epic.
The girls won, being the first to recover the jpeg and they did it all without a mouse. It was so awesome. The jpeg was the meme about how would a dog wear pants.
It was about 5 years ago, my first year teaching. I really miss those days. I only teach math now, and while I like that, there was something magical about showing kids how fun computers can be.
That is incredible. Good on you.
Out of curiosity, how much had you already taught them about the tasks? Was it just expected that between the whole team there would be someone who knew this stuff?
Thanks!
If I recall correctly I didn’t tell them much about anything. One of them had a nerd dad who set up his daughter with Linux at home but she wasn’t familiar with the install process. I gave them some basic info when I gave them the rules (you have to connect the hard drives and ram) but for the most part everything was new to them.
On the other hand, I also ran a computer club with some other kids (in a younger grade) where we took that pile of broken computers and salvaged working parts. We ended up with 3 or 4 working pcs that we ran Linux mint on. They used the computers for Roblox or something at lunch lol. The computers ended up being a popular attraction at lunch!
@maxprime my technology teacher in middle school did something similar with me and a bunch of other kids in 1995 or so. That’s how I fixed my first pc, and eventually started a career in IT. There was no team competition, but he basicallt said "these are some broken computers, if you can fix them you can have a lab to play Doom or whatever you want. He helped us setting up the IPX network tbf, but we had to check what dimm banks were working, which not, same with hdd and processors, and put togheter everything and install Windows 3.11
@maxprime @nayminlwin so basically… School of Rock but for nerds. You are Jack Black.
@maxprime @nayminlwin Great story! Reminds me of Cathy Malmrose’s “The Un-Scary Screwdriver”, https://thegnomejournal.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/the-un-scary-screwdriver/
@maxprime @nayminlwin you sound like the teacher i would’ve wished for.
If i were to become a teacher in the future (unlikely, but not impossible), i’d hope to be just as caring and enjoying the craft as you are. Keep it up! ☺️
I had some of my classes (14-15yr olds) assemble their own computers as the first class. It was cheap junk anyway, and I was willing to risk it, but it set the stage for the year. I dont think I got them to install system on it (whole school run on Linux btw), thats a great touch. And making it into something that entertaining, and stereotypes breaking is brilliant!
@maxprime
This is so full of awesomeness :D
@nayminlwin
@maxprime @nayminlwin This is it right there, the moments everyone will remember. Not always possible for day to day work I guess, but all too rare.
@maxprime @nayminlwin was the disk with correct partition table. So only mount the disk to recover the jpeg data. Or else?
What 9th grade is ? How old are kids here?
Yeah I had formatted and partitioned the disk ahead of time. The JPEG was in the root directory IIRC. I warned them to not plug in both hard drives during the install process to be sure not to overwrite the wrong drive. They were labelled physically but were otherwise identical.
Ninth grade is 14/15 year olds.
@maxprime @nayminlwin what an amazing story. I love that this could be gamified for them and made more fun. I presume you had a guide or helped them when they got stuck?
@maxprime @nayminlwin Ah, a wholesome IT teaching story. That’s something I might get into, when we train new interns and apprentices.
@sabriunal @maxprime @nayminlwin
I think they had the hardware disassambled and part of the challange was to put all things together to run the OS and finish the task.
@maxprime amazing, thank you for sharing!
I just started them on Linux machines from the get go. The same reason I got good at 3.1/95/98 was to setup games, filesharing, and getting hardware to work for better games. Even with Steam, there’s always some work to handle oddities. The kids are rapidly becoming reasonable basic admins the same way I did. Whether they decide to go further and learn more will be up to them.
Hmm, I guess I’ll start by guiding him to deal with his PC problems by himself.
That’s a good start. Also, include him in your own PC activities (some of them, make some up if you don’t have anything that he can be involved in at the time), like “I need to find a cool new background, I was thinking this and this might be cool, could you help me find something online?”. It gives kids a sense of being useful and wanted, plus a pat on the back, high 5 or something like that when the task is done. And it might inspire him to look for his own background, something he identifies with 😉.
Have a lot smaller kid, he’s 4, but this is just something from the top of my head… or how I would play it.
All too much of OS config, IT work, and troubleshooting is a combination of reading docs, trying things, and plenty of online searches. The big missing piece is motivation. That’s why I learned as a kid. It was all about building systems to play games.
For your kids, a combination of showing the basics, how to find out how to fix things, giving them agency to modify the OS (assume you’ll need to reinstall sometime), and a purpose could get them going. Not everyone find the motivation and interest, but kids are often more able to invest and explore than we give them credit for. I found my son (at age 13) at installed the proprietary NVidia driver for his laptop without my knowing. He just started following tutorials until it worked. Proud dad moment, time for ice cream, and then he went back to playing games with his buddies.
Give a kid the arch install wiki and a computer with the USB iso ready to go. Tell them they aren’t allowed food until they install it and run neofetch.
Any kid? Do I have to prove age? I’ll install for a 1kg of basmati, or 3kg of potatos, 2kg of beans, 5kg of onions, or anything similar.
The only advice I have is to try to make it interesting for them and not just additional practical information they have to memorize. You don’t want to be the weird dad that insists on using stuff nobody else does, you have to show them what’s cool about it, and also accept maybe they’ll just stick with Windows for now.
I also think the main takeaway they should have out of it is that there’s many ways of doing the same thing and none is “the correct and only way”. They should learn to think critically, navigate unfamiliar user interfaces, learn some more general concepts and connect the dots on how things work, and that computers are logical machines, they don’t just do random things because they’re weird. Teach them the value of being able to dig into how it works even if it doesn’t necessarily benefit them immediately.
Maybe set up a computer or VM with all sorts of WMs and DEs with the express permission to wreck it if they want, or a VM they can set up (even better if they learn they can make their own VMs as well!). Probably have some games on there as well. Maybe tour some old operating systems for the historical context of how we got where we are today. Show them how you can make the computers do things via a terminal and it does the same thing as in the GUI. Show different GUIs, different file managers, different text/document editors, maybe different DE’s, maybe even tiling vs floating. What is a file, how are ways you can organize them, how you can move them around, how some programs can open other program’s files.
Teach them the computer works for them not the other way around. They can make the computer do literally anything they want if they wish so. But it’s okay to use other people’s stuff too.
For me what planted the Linux seed is when I tried Mandrake Linux when I was 9-10ish. I didn’t end up sticking with it for all that long, but I absolutely loved trying out all those DEs. I had downloaded the full fat 5 CD version and checked almost everything during setup, so it came jam packed with all sorts of random software to try out. The games were nice, played the shit out of Frozen Bubble. I really liked Konqueror too, coming from Internet Explorer. It was pretty snappy overall. And there’s virtual desktops for more space! People were really helpful on IRC, even though I was asking about installing my Windows drivers in Wine. Unfortunately I kinda wanted games and my friends were getting annoyed we couldn’t play games on my computer.
It stuck with me however, so later on when some of my online friends were trying it out, I wanted to try it out again too. I wasn’t much into games anymore, had started coding a little bit. So on my computer went Kubuntu 7.10, and I’m still on Linux to this day.
But that seed is what taught me there’s more. I didn’t hate Windows, I wasn’t looking to replace it. I hadn’t fallen in love with FOSS yet. It was cool and different and fun. It wasn’t as sterile and as… grey as Windows 98. You could pop up some googly eyes that followed your mouse, because you could. There were all those weird DEs with all sorts of bars and features.
You don’t want to be the weird dad that insists on using stuff nobody else does, you have to show them what’s cool about it, and also accept maybe they’ll just stick with Windows for now.
This 👆. Be weird, but be cool at the same time. None of the other dads can do this, but yours can 🦸 ☺️… and, he can teach you how to do a lot more cool stuff as well 😉.
Maybe a Steam Deck if they’re into gaming, boy do people love to tinker with their Decks.
But the deck can also be used for gaming with zero tinkering, so kids will do that.
Yes, he’ll just drop into Steam when something gets too hard to acomplish. I wouldn’t use the deck as a learning tool as well.
I love Linux gaming. Got the Steam deck for my SO. She kind of hates it BECAUSE it’s not a no tinker device.
Like if you pick the right games you’re good, but want to play the “wrong” game, or want to mod, and your back to tinkering.
I don’t mind it at all, it’s just what PC gaming has been for me my whole life, but for her, someone who only experienced gaming on newer consoles it’s a pain in the tush.
I also think the main takeaway they should have out of it is that there’s many ways of doing the same thing and none is “the correct and only way”. They should learn to think critically, navigate unfamiliar user interfaces, learn some more general concepts and connect the dots on how things work, and that computers are logical machines, they don’t just do random things because they’re weird. Teach them the value of being able to dig into how it works even if it doesn’t necessarily benefit them immediately.
This will come gradually. First, show him one way of doing things, let it sink in, let him get comfortable with it, then say “you know, you could do that in another way as well 😉”. I bet he’ll start asking you if there are other ways as well in no time 😂.
With my kid, he just gets on Steam and starts doing his thing with his friends like everybody else as if he was on Windows. It makes no difference to him. I figure I’d let him learn the same way I learned computers, by just standing back and letting him poke and prod around and giving assistance and guidance when necessary. He can’t break anything important.
I tried this with my son, who is now 17 and not nearly as computer literate as I was by his age, let alone Linux literate at all. I think it’s a generational thing, as a kid growing up in the 90s I HAD to learn how to administer our PC at a higher level to do the things I wanted to do. Now with easy apps and tablets and auto-installation of all-the-things you just don’t need to be an advanced user to do what you want to do. This is just my experience, YEMV
