Developing Software for Girls & Boys!

Kreuzlingen Holiday Pass

The Swiss holiday pass are two weeks of holiday activities packed with exciting and entertaining activities. Usually, those activities are free of charge for the participating kids and teenagers, and typically, at least at Kreuzlingen, the city at lake Constance, they are outdoor activities. This year, though, marked the second appearance of an IT-related holiday activity: Software development for girls and boys, with Free Software and Linux.

Create awareness and multiplicators

Peter Bittner, a Kreuzlingen-based software developer and DevOps engineer, held a 4-day course with 5 participants. The main goal of the event was to create awareness of the existence of a Free alternative to Microsoft Windows and Apple's macOS, and the important and dominant role Free Software plays in today's modern cloud-based software development.

A real software developer's journey

Five boys, aged 12-14, learned to overcome the challenges of a BIOS to boot our beloved GNU/Linux from a USB stick. A major hurdle they all managed to handle with their own notebooks after some significant effort.

Next stop, knowing the tools and services software developers use – Git, GitLab, Codium, Slack *sic* – and working in the terminal with Bash commands, navigating through the directories, adding, committing, pushing code and investigating change logs. This journey was driven by the quest of My first website!, guided by the W3's HTML validator service. Because we want the Web to be a safe place, with only working software.

After another day of moving the initial manual QA procedures to tool-driven and later automated processes, using CI pipelines, all participants managed to publish their masterpieces using the free GitLab Pages service. (Unfortunately, GitLab now requires you to enter credit card details to access their free tier – to guard against abuse, as they explain.)

The final day was about, what some call, real programming. Coding Python. We used Firefox and Selenium driven by Python code to automate the login process on malicious social media websites. A fun problem solving exercise, which combines deciphering error messages and navigating through HTML and CSS code, practicing the use of the Web browser's Inspector just as much as getting to know the dirty tricks of website optimization and defence.

We need our kids to know what school doesn't teach them

The participants were quite young and the free Linux operating system was new to all of them. It's important that we go the extra mile to show them what they need to know to form a free society, built by technology that respects and promotes freedom, not from corporations that pursue their own ideals for the sake of profit. We need more of these drops in the ocean.

The FSFE provided stickers that the kids were a big fan of! Healthy food for the breaks was sponsored by Peter and some of the kids' parents, accompanied by Kreuzlingen's wonderful tap water. Cheers!

Impressions

Participants 2001 Participants 2001 Participants 2001 Participants 2001

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Kreuzlingen Holiday Pass (2020)

The Swiss holiday pass are two weeks of holiday activities packed with exciting and entertaining activities. Usually, those activities are free of charge for the participating kids and teenagers, and typically, at least at Kreuzlingen, the city at lake Constance, they are outdoor activities. This year, though, we had our first IT-related holiday activity: Software development for girls and boys, with Free Software and Linux.

Directions at the location

Create awareness and multiplicators

Peter Bittner, a Kreuzlingen-based software developer and DevOps engineer, held two 3-day courses with up to 7 participants. Main goal of the event was to create awareness of the existence of a Free alternative to Microsoft Windows and Apple's macOS, and the important and dominant role Free Software plays in today's modern cloud-based software development.

Switzerland has a very uniform landscape of hard- and software in primary education: Almost exclusively Apple hardware, accompanied by Microsoft Office products and infrastructure services. Pupils are being taught "products" of the technology giants ("Safari", "Word", "Excel", "PowerPoint") instead of information technology concepts (web browser, text processor, spreadsheet, presentations). With this course, kids should get hands-on experience with GNU/Linux and development tools made of Free Software, so they could act as multiplicators for a better future.

A big Thanks to everyone who made this possible!

The FSFE sponsored cool stickers, information posters and flyers, Lioh Möller's Faircomputer sponsored two laptops to use during the course and give away for free. Two Kreuzlingen software development agencies sponsored USB sticks for running Ubuntu with persistent data on any PC and snacks for the breaks. Organic apples and the excellent Kreuzlingen tap water were available for free too, for healthy breaks.

Course 1 (Mon-Wed) had 3 girls and 3 boys, while course 2 (Thu-Sat) had only boys, all aged 12-13. The location, a Kreuzlingen school building, was accessible by wheelchair as needed for one of the course participants. Everyone was super-happy and excited to take home the USB stick with all the achieved programming work and their new, friendly operating system.

Impressions

Participants of course 2

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