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.
Wow, just WOW 👏👏👏.
I wish there were more teachers like you in schools. Inspired people, in general... that's what's lacking in society nowadays 😔.
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!
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.
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.
Thanks, I try ☺️.
It was hard for me at first, grasping how to bring up and educate him... it didn't come naturally for me. But my mom was a lot of help, she gave me a lot of pointers and I just started building on that 😉.
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.
I had good luck walking my nephew through installing and setting up arch. Great introduction into linux, he was 13 but thats close enough to the given range
A friend of mine got his son to use Linux by just not providing an alternative, he installed Debian edu (don't know if that's the name, but basically a Debian spin for kids with parental restrictions and stuff) on an old laptop for him and that's what he used. Once he got his own PC it was over though since he wanted to play Fortnite so bad that he bought windows for that. He still dual boots Fedora, but I don't think he has used it since the windows partition is there.
I think the thing is you can't really get kids (or people in general for that matter) into Linux the way you are probably into it and interested in it. At least not if they're not already interested in it on their own. They will learn how to use it sure, but not the way we're used to using Linux, understanding the intricacies of the system, keeping the system safe,... They'll probably find a way to do what they already do on windows and ignore that the OS is different.
IMO, his aproach was too strict, that's why it failed and just caused repulsion towards Linux. There are other ways you can "make" children like things.
I don't think this was too strict, maybe I made it sound that way, but it was not like he forbid him using windows, it was just that he's using Linux, his son got his old laptop that was running Linux and they didn't have a windows license, so his son was running Linux as well. He's also doing fine on Linux and doesn't dislike it or anything, the only "problem" was that he wanted to play Fortnite which does not work on Linux. He's also getting along fine with Linux, especially on fedora where he doesn't need the Terminal.
What I wanted to say with that comment is that you can't make your kids to learn and use Linux like most of us probably do. For most people an operating system is still just some black magic on their computer that makes the browser or their games run, they don't care how it works or if it is secure or using the latest software. Most people just don't know and don't care what an OS even is and the same thing goes for kids imo
Oh, that's different then... I thought his dad was like "run Debian, or you're grounded", lol 😂.
I agree on the last part, that is most definitely true. You can try, but you can't force it 🤷. After all, his/hers gifts may lay in another field, not tech 😉.
A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That's what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.
I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same "drive mappings" to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.
I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I've written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their ... issues but both work pretty well.
Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.
As a kid I had windows 98 (and later xp) dual booted with debian and at some point some version of suse. This was ~20 years ago
Well I used it just fine and I knew a bout the mysterious "root" and "sudo" that my dad would use but I was just playing some games and maybe using the web browser.
Using the GUI I never learned Linux and it wasn't until a few years ago that I started using Linux again, and it was only because I wouldn't be able to continue using Windows 7 anymore.
So I don't have any experience with teaching Linux and especially not to kids, but I think kids are actually really good at learning stuff if they need too, so give them a PC and the tools to figure things out, if they want to use it they've got to learn, and don't give them other options where they don't have to learn anything.
I taught adult education in college and always introduced people to computing with "DOS for Dummies" even though Windows was the OS they interacted with. By teaching them in a command line only environment first I could then easily teach them the desktop environment because they understood what was going on behind the scenes. I think the same could be done with Linux.
Yeah, but the kid has to be older, 12 is too young for that IMO.
Still, a Linux install with a DE will do nicely. He wants to do this and this, but there is no GUI for it, tell him to open up the terminal and type in the following commands, see what happens after you hit Enter... it always brings a smile, even with adults ☺️, they feel like they're hackers or something 😂.
Then they usually wanna know what each of the commands and options do, and this is where I know I have a great student ☺️.
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How do you mean teach?
Just getting them to use it or teaching them terminal commands?
My son's windows focused ICT curriculum is pissing me off a bit. So I guess what I wanna teach is something similar to what a kid's ICT text book would teach, except that it will be for Linux.
Huh, may be I should look for kid friendly linux books first.
I don't know what your - and your kid's - situation is, but I worry pushing Linux onto someone would be counterproductive to getting them to like it.
I only use it because I genuinely like and appreciate it. I'd probably start by getting him interested in it. If he likes it enough then he'll try and learn more by himself.
I recently got an LLM running locally on an AMD GPU. This was only possible on Linux. Depending on your son, something like that could be a cool way to get him interested.
Yeah, I also don't wanna push it too hard.
Gonna be hard though. He's way too into roblox these days.
G-compris is great for kids. Both of my kids have only ever used Linux or Chrome OS.
I have no experience
But you might be interested in this:
https://www.opensourceforu.com/2018/04/kturtle-a-programming-language-for-children/
