Teaching free/open source to high school students

A few weeks ago I taught a class on Open Source: Contributing to free culture (catalog entry) for Spark, a one-day program put on by the student-run MIT Educational Studies Program. I was fortunate to have two helpful co-teachers, Tyler Hallada and Jacob Hurwitz, who assisted with the lesson plan and the in class lecture.

We ended up teaching 3 sessions of the 1hr 50min class that Saturday, with about 10 students in each session.

I was pretty impressed by the quality of the students; a number of them had used GNU/Linux before, but even those who hadn't were able to gain something from the experience. The class was broken up into three segments:

1. Lecture on a brief history of open source and the free software movement
2. Small research project on an open source project
3. Lab where students could work through OpenHatch's training missions

The point was to mix up what could otherwise be a very boring lecture.

I think we might have missed the mark on the last bit, as I get the feeling that we didn't end up giving the students good actionables. While the quality of OpenHatch is high and the organization's campus outreach programs are amazing, skills practice only goes so far without clear direction to apply said skills. I'll be following up with the class participants to see how they're progressing on their own open source contributor journey, and will post updates if I have any.

While not an OpenHatch event, if this sort of thing interests you, OpenHatch runs a series of events like this one and has a mailing list for discussing planning and sharing best practices. Subscribe and say hi!

The presentation is enclosed below, and of course is licensed under CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. [PDF]

Trip to SCOTUS, Camreta v. Greene (09-1454) or: "Justices just want tohave fun"

I usually write about technical topics in this space, so pardon my digression. </metablogging>

Today my AP Gov't class took a trip to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). We were fortunate to get reserved seating thanks to one of my classmates, so we skipped the line and were able to sit for an entire argument. We didn't get to choose which of the two arguments we saw, since half our group was randomly sent to each. I didn't get the one I had hoped for. Camreta v. Greene (the one I attended), however, proved to be much more entertaining than Schindler Elevator v. US ex rel. Kirk, at least based on the people I talked to. A quick search of the transcripts for each confirms this:

Argument
    # of instances of "(Laughter)"
Camreta
12
Schindler
0

Facts of the case

The Huffington Post has a detailed overview of the circumstances surrounding the case, which didn't gloss over any details or strike me as overly biased; they certainly did a better job than I did. The whole story is rather sad, but what came before the court was this: whether a child can be questioned by the police, Child Protective Services, or other governmental agencies without parental consent, probable cause, or "extingent circumstances". If so, on what grounds can such questioning occur?