[FSUG-Bangalore] Report: Free Software Session at ITI Kolar Gold Fields

[Balaji Kutty]

Hi all,

Yesterday(May  3, 2008) we conducted a Free Software awareness session to
students of ITI Kolar Gold Fields. This is just a small report on it.

At about 7am we(myself, Justing, Resinesh and Jaykumar) gathered in my house
in BTM. We had already decided to go by car. We got to Old Madras road
towards Kolar. After a small(45 mins!) break for breakfast, we reached the
ITI campus at about 9:45am which is just 3kms before Kolar Gold Fields(KGF).

ITI is a nice big campus hosting around 700 students. It has a nice computer
lab too. We got around 30-35 students listen to us. I introduced them Free
software. Jaykumar helped  the students by translating my lecture to
Kannada. While we were talking to students, Resinesh installed Ubuntu 7.10
in one of the machines there for demo. After about 45 mins of boring the
students, we took them to the lab. There with our laptops and the newly
installed desktop, we showed the students the Debain and Ubuntu
distributions and asked them to play around with it. Justing and Resinesh
demonstrated them different tools of GNU/Linux, using different languages in
GNU/Linux, etc. More than 95% of the students have never even heard about
GNU/Linux and do not even think that there  is  an alternative to MsWindows.


After the demo we had a small chat with the students and asked them to form
a group to work and learn some distribution of GNU/Linux to start with. They
will call us  if they need any help. We stared back arounnd 1:30pm, had
lunch and reached Bangalore around 4:15pm.

The kids are smart as usual. They lack only exposure. We felt that it is
very important for Free Software Community to reach places like these where
GNU/Linux is not even heard of. We should come up with a proper plan and
execute.

Thanks,
Balaji
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