ODF Olypiad - I realized...

Recently came to know about ODF Olypiad for school kids. Interesting. Hats off to the group or person for the idea of the contest. When we introduce school kids to open source software help them participate, the reach of is tremendous. From my side I spoke to a class VII kid who had come home for vacation about the contest. She was all excited and the presentation she prepared impressed all of us in the family.
Considering
- she has never heard about the term open source before I spoke to her about contest
- she is just learning MS powerpoint and excel in school. No other programming languages so far or now.
- First time she used linux(Open suse), Open office tools

At the end of two days she wanted me to install linux in her PC!! WOW! That is the spirit. I am waiting to do it.

While helping her out with presentation, found a couple of interesting projects

• Edubuntu
• kde-educational

More about contest in this link

If you are reading this blog before Nov 15 2008 and know any school kid and you are a open source enthusiast do pass this info and help them participate. It is a great feeling to see a person getting excited about open source.

Schools in India should go for open source software. There is a huge collection of software and it is all free. Instead of spending money in software they can buy more computers so that many students get a chance to learn! I think the problem is awareness. Kids of this generation are superfast, they learn tools faster!

In the process of assisting the kid understand OSS, I realized many non computer people don't know that they have to pay for windows,ms office as pirated software is so freely available! Unfortunate!