Middle School Ubuntu Computer Lab Class --Lesson Plan Ideas?

[skullmunky]

@Prospero2006: awesome.

I went to a Math/Science/Technology Magnet middle school. It was famous for including Shuttle Flight Simulator training in science class. Turns out it was a big cardboard box with a Nintendo in it

Things have come a long way. Keep it up!

Other ideas - if you want to try something with programming and multimedia, you could do Processing (www.processing.org).

Or, my other fave, Panda3D (www.panda3d.org), which is a python library for quickly making 3D games.

[meborc]

it would be great if you finished the year by making a little, but still working and needed linux program/game

this would teach the children programming, teamwork, leadership, time planning and a lot more...

and not to mention the satisfaction they will get from the finished work

each kid could work on something they are best at (coding, graphics, sounds, QA etc)

this would also teach them about open source and how everyone can contribute, even if they are not so good at programming languages

[CrazyDesi]

Smart Kids!

[hubie]

This suggestion would have probably been more applicable to the work last semester, but you might have them work on Windows recovery skills such as password resetting, drive scanning, and file recovery. The kind of things that you can do with the Trinity Rescue Kit and other bootable CDs. I am the lone linux guy where I work and these skills come up from time to time as my co-worker Windows boxes have issues, and they inevitably try to turn to Norton, or download a half dozen shareware programs (that I cynically guess to be most likely just repackaged GPL code). These are very useful skills to have when family or friends are told that their PC is "dead" by some big box store tech guy who suggest reformatting and reinstalling, and you come in and fix their corrupted hard drive or recover important files that would otherwise have been wiped. Since you already have them creating and booting off of a USB drive, these kind of tools naturally would naturally fit (unless, of course, you are already doing those things and I didn't pick up on that).

A whole other area to target is network security. The slew of things like nmap, Snort, Wireshark, Tripwire, etc. are very useful to know and can easily fill weeks of time. You inevitably get into topics such as the TCP stack, authentication, SSL certs, etc.

[nightalon]

Hubie and Prospero, you guys seem to want to teach these kids to be sys admins! I'm not sure that's an ideal career path these days especially with outsourcing....

I will admit that these are all valuable skills at the moment, and having a distro that everyone can take home with them on a pen drive is pretty cool. Setting up LTSP and demonstrating its functionality would be cool too, but that would be pretty tough, and likely also destructive of the current setup.

Admin/Technical Setup Question:
How are you locking these systems down? How do you have login/users set up? I set up a lab in Ghana a year ago with 12 used Dells running Ubuntu. I tried LTSP "fat" clients, but the NIC on the "server" XPS laptop (faster than the rest) had died so the network was running over a USB adapter, so LTSP wasn't really feasible. Also, internet was too expensive, which really sucked.

Proposed Coursework:
As for coursework, honestly, I'd recommend teaching students how to lay out a "broadside" or "newspaper" in Scribus, get comfortable with GIMP, (layers, masks, etc.) do a little programming in Java using Eclipse, move on to Haskell, (starting on functional programming [concepts of recursion, abstraction] when they're young is probably easier than teaching it later), work on designing and laying out web pages with Screem, do some vector graphic design with Inkscape, (design a logo) (in my middle school we had a LEGO Dacta/Mindstorms setup and we had to model our projects from scratch in Illustrator)

Advanced functionality of spreadsheet software was another invaluable skill I learned in middle and high school: histograms, error bars, sorting, filters, charts, (pivot-tables, macros, regressions if these kids are really MIT-bound...)

You could even install SketchUp under WINE. There's a whole architecture track you could do using open-source CAD software, and then rendering in Blender. Product design is an alternative to architecture.

Then you could call it a day with a little video editing in Kino, some star-gazing in Celestia or Stellarium, a trip to Ancient Rome in Google Earth, and maybe a little digital music or remixing (cutting, splicing, and jamming DJ-style) with Ardour.

Robotics:
You could also buy a couple Arduinos or one of those other programmable boards and a $100 "cooker" module to do some basic robotics. The Dacta setup we had was amazingly cool when I see university engineering setups (Yale) but I'm sure it was and still is fairly expensive. {I actually had my own set at home, so I know it was expensive...shhh...don't tell anyone...}

Don't get me wrong, teaching these kids how to setup LAMP and a wiki is a great exercise. It could even earn them some money if they did it for others. I just think the IT-related stuff will become obsolete very quickly. It might be good for a summer job, but not for a career path/higher education.

Also, it's easy to get bogged down in the configuration/technical/IT aspect of Linux. I should know. I triple-boot on my production desktop, convertible tablet, and netbook. ;-D (if you want to teach more configuration stuff, teaching students how to build Chromium or OLPC Sugar from scratch would be a good idea)


A side note:
I love OLPC's Sugar setup and find it fascinating. You probably don't have enough computers or external HDs, but it would be cool to have a demo section of your lab where you demonstrate an OLPC Sugar install, an LTSP setup, the differences between Ubuntu MID/UMPC version and UNR edition, KDE, OS X on a PC, what Windows 7 looks like, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Studio, etc. A Linux/OS "playground" if you will. You could have a new treat set up for the students each week.

Getting on Skype/Pidgin/Ekiga and videochatting/text chatting with Ubuntu developers from all around the world would be loads of fun! Maybe you can even write Mark Shuttleworth and he'll do a videochat with you!

[ashmew2]

boohoo I wish i had a chance to go to a school like that boohoo

[meborc]

boohoo I wish i had a chance to go to a school like that boohoo

maybe in next life, eh?

[ashmew2]

maybe in next life, eh?

Hehe

Lol , teaching computers to kids in a better way , i mean better than how i have been taught at school over the years , makes me all excited

[meborc]

Hehe

Lol , teaching computers to kids in a better way , i mean better than how i have been taught at school over the years , makes me all excited

yeah... even in my university, the IT classes (compulsory) that we had only consisted of word, excel and visual basic...

we made a picture to fly around with using excel macros... nice, yes... but practical? NO

total waste of time

[ashmew2]

yeah... even in my university, the IT classes (compulsory) that we had only consisted of word, excel and visual basic...

we made a picture to fly around with using excel macros... nice, yes... but practical? NO

total waste of time

My IT teacher still uses Win98 OMG!@?# And we are like W T F ?!@?#

And they taught us GW-BASIC , which in my views is better than learning excel if you wanna be a programmer