[Ambassadors] Idea: Fedora to Schools

[Onyeibo Oku]

On Wed, 2013-12-18 at 18:42 +0100, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
> Hi,
> I've got an idea I'd like to propose to other ambassadors. I think
> someone has already brought this idea up in the mailing list while ago
> and we discussed it quite thoroughly at the EMEA FAD ten days ago.
> 
> Educational organizations is an area we should focus on a lot and
> students and teachers should be one of our main target audiences. I
> think reasons are pretty obvious: school time is usually when people
> choose their area of interest in IT. Who of us didn't start with Linux
> and open source at high school or university? What students interact
> with and learn at school is what they tend to use in their lives.
> Students is probably the biggest source of new contributors.
> Therefore Fedora should be there.
> 
> What would be the goal of this initiative:
> Making Fedora more visible at schools, helping teachers and students and
> making it easier for them to start using Fedora and leverage all its
> advantages.
> 
<snip>

Great Idea.

I am already on this path except that I started lower (at Kindergarten
Level through Secondary School).  I also Lecture at the University of
Science and Technology Enugu (Nigeria) but I'm an Architect (not a
Developer. Also not the Software-Kinda Architect).  It hasn't been easy
deflating the egos of the Computer Science lecturers in our Institution.
They still gravitate heavily towards MS-Windows which I find odd for
Software Engineers.  Hopefully, one day my request to present Fedora to
the department will be granted.

As I said earlier, I am trying to create awareness from ground-up. For
lower schools the presentation should center around running Fedora with
Sugar DE while, for High schools its about teaching students to see
computers as an all-embracing box that can host choice OSes -- and of
course, Fedora is one of them.  A lot of Children grow up thinking that
Windows means computing and by the time they first encounter Linux,
they're biased and confused.  So, i think this campaign should start at
grassroots.

As for High Schools, the 'catch' is to encourage more teachers to
diversify in their use of Software tools (in this case, into open-source
solutions like Fedora).  The more these teachers run Fedora, the more
likely they will key into this campaign and essentially finish the
ambassadorial work on our behalf.  In other words, GET the Teachers and
you've GOT the students (that means you've also got the future).  There
are other nodes to target like organizations who are responsible for
creating School curricula.  Now that is another controversial area to
address

Regards
Onyeibo