Souhegan High School

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

Hi,

Two weeks ago I went to Souhegan High School in Amherst to vote, and
while there I looked up their computer technical person (they are mostly
a windows shop, but also have MACs) and offered to do a presentation to
the students and faculty on FOSS and free culture.

They asked their "community service coordinator" to arrange for it.

They arranged for 16 students, selected by their teachers, to come to a
classroom today and hear my 45 minute talk.  Also attending was the
community service coordinator, the technical person from Souhegan and a
coordinator from the Wilton high school there (since they had just
gotten an application that runs from a Linux server).

The coordinator also supplied homemade Tacos, cookies and soda (both
Coke and Mountain Dew) and got an LCD projector for me.

I brought Fedora CDs donated by Red Hat and T-shirts donated by
O'Reilly.

I was warned that these were "high school students" and it was "hard to
keep their attention".  I started with a slide that showed five people
that did amazing things with FOSS before they were 22 (one as young as
11), most of whom are now very successful and one of whom was a former
student at Souhegan.

I had to go like blazes to get through the talk, only had time for about
three questions (and all of the questions were good) before they had to
go off to their next class.

One of them, before he left with his T-shirts and Fedora CD, asked me
which language I would recommend as a "first language".  I told them
"Python" (you can thank me later, Bill), and tonight I have been helping
him find the proper packages for python on the Fedora 12 CD.  He was
trying to install Python from the source code package and "having
problems".  I directed him toward Yum and Fedora's graphical
installation menus.

He did manage to get Adobe Flash installed by himself.

The community services coordinator asked if I would be interested in
giving a course in FOSS for their adult evening program.  I explained
that my travel schedule usually prohibits long scheduled sessions, but I
would be happy to put together some one or two day "workshops" that
could be done on the weekends.

She took lots of pictures of the group, and said that I could use one of
the pictures in my blog talking about the experience.

They have a nice lab filled with relatively new machines.  I pointed out
that with the correct software we could teach either high performance
computing or "cloud" computing.

For others on this list that might want to participate, these are paid
teaching courses, and while the pay is probably not gigantic, you may
find that courses you have already put together are easily
repackaged...and courses that you give may lead to other business.  In
any case, these courses would be for next fall, so you have time to
think about it.

As the students get more involved, I think we may have some "new blood"
coming into the group.  I found them very intelligent, very polite and
very thoughtful.

Friday I am going to visit Milford High school and offer the same talk.

Next week I will hit the Community College on Amherst St. in Nashua.

I will also see if the Community College might think about hosting the
GNHLUG meetings.  Not as much "fun" as Marthas, but may be a little less
hassle to schedule the facilities far in advance.

md