Education Case Study: Students entertained and educated with free software

How things got started...

In Slovakia all young men must choose between a military service or a civil service. It takes one year. I've chosen the second. I taught at the Elementary school in village Pribeta. No computers were there. I started from the zero. At the first I prepared project which was successful. The school obtained new 6 computers from INFOVEK (association supported by ministry of education in Slovak republic - www.infovek.sk). The teaching staff didn't know work with computers. I taught children on the regular hours and after classes. I developed teaching staff computer skills too.

Why Free Software?

I teach at Institute of Informatics, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University in Slovakia (Europe). We use Linux here in common.Therefore I have decided to implement Linux at the elementary school. I wanted try if Linux can be an alternative to MS Windows.

The plan...

I had installed dual boot (Windows 98/RH Linux) at the 5 computers.(But I used Linux with children of course.) One computer was a server. There was installed RH Linux only. The server managed users (children and teachers) [NIS/YP service]. It provided home directories for other computers via internet [NFS service]. The MS Windows server emulation [Samba] was running on the server too. Every user had e-mail box and a personal www page at the server (children also). It's better than free portal on Internet. One computer had a CD writer which was accessible for other computers. A printer was attached to the server. A scanner as the CD writer was plugged at a "user" computer and was accessible from other ones. The school had also some old computers (i486) and I made X consoles from it.

Evaluation...

It was very difficult explain that software could not be freely copied and installed. I must installed MS Windows because some commercial software which school obtained from the ministry of education (INFOVEK) had not worked under Linux. MS Windows 98 was also obtained from the ministry but I don't expect that INFOVEK will buy MS licenses of a new version every year. It was interesting that GCompris (gcompris.sourceforge.net) was better than some commercial education software. Children (1-5) enjoyed it. I tried to use Comenius Logo (Imagine) under the wine (Windows emulator) but it wasn't work correctly. Kids could experiment with Linux because it is an open source. They could change many things. Linux contains many applications which can be used in a teaching process. Children enjoyed to the logging mechanism and to the face browser especially. Every child had a little house (home directory), which they could arrange.
Some photos from the experiment documents kids interest.