I am ending my day totally exhausted but happy. Today we organised Red Hat 4 Kids in the Red Hat France office.
Every year at Red Hat, we organise a Red Hat Week to celebrate our culture. And in good open source community way, each local office expresses how it pleases this event. This year, I proposed to do a Devoxx4Kids for the children of French Red Hatters.
Red Hat 4 Kids (aka a copy paste of Devoxx 4 Kids) initiates children from 6 to 12+ to the notion of programming. Sharing our knowledge to teach them what daddy or mummy does. Sounds cool.
I knew it was doable since the awesome Devoxx4Kids team has successfully declined these events around the world. But my engineering spider-senses told me it would be quite a humongous task. I was right but it’s one of those projects where you need to jump first and think later.
What did we do?
For the 6 to 10 years old boys and girls, we have done a Scratch workshop. Scratch is awesome, it has all the basics of programming: blocks, loops, conditions, events, event sharing, etc… Here, not need to prepare much, explain the basics and let the kids go (see below).
For the 10+ kids, we have done the Arduino workshop: programming electronics for the win :) We have reused the Devoxx4Kids one verbatim.
What are the challenges?
- You need to prepare everything material wise
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We installed a fresh Fedora 22 on all laptops to get everything set up the same: this really helped as we did not have to fight different environments. To be safe, we used ethernet and not WiFi: some WiFi routers don’t enjoy too many laptops at once.
- Don’t go too long
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For the 6-10 years old, they started to slowly drift after one hour. Don’t go over 1h30 per workshops and do breaks between them. For the 10+, they actullally went beyond our 1h30 and chose coding over cakes: success!
- Limit the introduction and slides as much as possible
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Developers don’t like slides. It turns out kids disregard them after 4 mins top. I had to cut the presentation quickly and instead…
- Do customized assistance
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Show them by pair-kid-programming how to do the basic things and let them do what they want: help them achieve their goal: story, adventure, games etc… One grown up for one to two laptops, two kids per laptops. Max. They will be much more engaged.
Special thanks
It’s quite a special feeling to see a good chunk of the kids being that engaged, asking tougher and tougher questions over time and preferring coding to cakes.
I have many people to thank for this project. Hopefully I won’t forget too many of them:
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the Devoxx4Kids team for putting their workshop in open source
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Audrey and Arun from Devoxx4Kids for giving me customized advice and reassuring me along the way
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the Red Hat French facilities team for saying yes to this project and putting up with all the material challenges (room size, power outlets, laptop hunt, mouse chasing, etc.)
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the local Red Hat techies for gathering the hardware, installing the machines, testing everything and helping out during the workshops
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last be not least, the Aldebaran team for being part of the fun
Just Fracking do it
Don’t think, do it. Go to http://devoxx4kids.org and start from their workshops.
