Photos from the College of Enginnering SFD Event, 2006
(Supported by the FLOSS Cell at College of Engineering Chengannur) http://floss.cec.googlepages.com/
The Software Freedom Day was conducted on 29th of September 2006 by the College of Engineering Chengannur.
As the part of the celebration, we spent the whole day at two State Government run schools nearby. They are supposed to be studying GNU/Linux as a part of their syllabus but they are not doing it fully as the staff has not received enough training.
So 13 students from our college (we have a FLOSS cell at college) went to this school and we conducted a whole day training with laptops and multimedia projectors. The training was attended by around 250 students and 6 staff members. We installed a customized CD called "IT@School" on the computers in the labs which had only Windows earlier. And we rectified the "Xserver not loading problem" on some machines which were branded as "not working". Some computers were also not functional as the video memory was not allocated properly. And some machines had worn out BIOS batteries. We changed them also.
So altogether, we helped two schools set up their labs properly, installed necessary software so that they could teach the next batch of students in a good way.
We divided ourselves in to five teams. One team consisting of Pramod and Prashanth handled the training for the staff members. Another team consisting of Aparna, Shaj, Joseph and Stephen talked about "Freedom, Software Freedom Day and about why we should not use proprietary software etc". The third team consisting of Anjali and Githin taught how to use a GNU/Linux system by going in to menus and other GNOME features, they also demonstrated certain useful software. The fourth team consisting of Sharika and Anurag taught tuxpaint, GIMP, gcompris etc. Allen and Ameen made up the fifth team and they went around teaching Open Office tools. Jayakrishnan was running up and down fixing up venues and doing all the necessary work to ensure that the classes go on well.
We divided the students in to 4 teams. Each team consisted of around 60 students. Then we arranged four venues which consisted of two computer labs and two halls. One hall had a laptop and a multimedia projector.
We invited students to do small animations and paintings and gave away chocolates and CDs as prizes. We had bought 300 pieces of chocolates for the students and around 60 ubuntu CDs and some GNU/Linux stickers. All of us pooled in money to buy the chocolates.
After the talks got over, we conducted a small quiz. We asked about things we had taught them today and generally about The students definitely liked them. Finally, we conducted an oral feedback session and the general opinions were "it was a very nice time" "we had so much fun" "please come again" "we learned so much". The schools also gave us "thank you" letters for our work. They all agreed that only "Free Software" should be used in schools.
Here are some of the photos taken during the event.
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