Free Software and Children
Education

The GNUrias Experience

Joice Käfer

Gnurias

Who am I?

Joice Käfer (joice@gnurias.org.br)

Computer Engineering Student – Univates (www.univates.br)

Free Software user since 2000

Solis – Free Software Co-operative (www.solis.coop.br)

Gnurias User Group

(www.gnurias.org.br)

The beginning
of Gnurias

Free Sofware International Forum, Porto Alegre, 2001.

Baptized by our “oficial godfather” and big
incentivator,

Cesar Brod

Why Gnurias?

GNU (Gnu is Not Unix)

GURIAS = Girls in Gaucho Portuguese

GNU + “GURIAS” = GNURIAS

Mission

“Widen and stimulate the use of Free Software within the community, contributing to the development of free knowledge, promoting social equality and the improvement of life's quality, giving value to the women's work.”

Objectives

Integrate women in the free software movement

Use free software to give people access to knowledge

Actions

Free Software as an educational tool:	*TuxPaint, Gcompris, ...

Training elders:
*Text editing, Internet access, e-mail, ...

Participation in events:
*World Social Forum, Porto Alegre	*Free Software Internacional Forum, Porto Alegre
*Free Software International Conference, Curitiba
*Penguin's Week

World Social Forum

2003

http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/tuxpaint

http://www.ofset.org/gcompris/

Penguin's Week - Univates

A

Project “Universidade Solidária”
Mucajaí/RR

a

Workshop at Martin Luther School
Estrela/RS

A

Workshop with the
“Projeto Aprendiz”

a

Project Plans

Adoption of a school

Workshops at “Casa de Passagem” with the help of the Taquarix user group

Educational free-software tools web portal to help teachers

OpenOffice training for young adults

http://www.gnurias.org.br

http://www.solis.coop.br

http://www.univates.br

Joice Käfer
joice@gnurias.org.br

Thanks!

Hello everybody, my name is Joice Käfer, and as you probably have noticed right now, I am not Australian. (pause) Actually, English is not my first language, and this is my first time in an international conference. So, I will ask you to excuse me because I will be using my notes to present my slides to you. I am using them right now. (pause) Pretty much everything you are hearing from me, I am reading. (pause)

I am a Computer Engineering student. I am on vacation (sort of) between my seventh and eight term. I study at Univates, a small university centre in the south of Brasil. I would like to take this moment to thank Linux Conf Australia, Univates and Solis for sponsoring my presence here.

Univates became quite known all over Brasil and also around the world for its free software production. My first job was with Univates as a computer lab assistant, where I started working with free software in the year 2000. So, I work with free software since my first job.

Univates IT department evolved into Solis, a Free Software development Co-Operative I helped to start in the beginning of 2003 and where I work now as a web developer. Inside Univates we also started the Gnurias Free Software user group. I will tell you a little bit more about it in the next couple slides.

When we were participating at the Free Software International Forum in 2001, in Porto Alegre, one of the things we were discussing was the lack of women in the IT market. At that moment, we were already four girls working at the IT department of our University. And we were all working with free software. So, we thought: “Why not use free software as an entry point for women in the IT industry?”. After all, free software is about freedom, and freedom is also about “equality”. We still didn't know exactly what we would be doing, but we decided to think our future as a group.

Our boss, Cesar Brod, (he still is my boss) liked the idea very much, and came up with the name “GNURIAS”. He is still part of our group and a great incentivator of our work.

Now, why Gnurias? As we are in a Free Software conference, you probably know the name GNU comes from the acronym GNU is Not Unix. GNU is the name Richard Stallman invented for a free Unix-like operating system which most people know simply as Linux.

“Gurias” is how we call “girls” in the south of Brasil. So, Gurias is the Gaucho Portuguese translation of Girls. Put GNU and Gurias together and you get Gnurias.

As our group evolved, and we ended up working with several activities, we came up with this mission, which expresses the way our group thinks of what we should be doing. [Read the Mission]

We also came up with two very focused objectives. The first one: “Integrate women in the free software movement” actually means we recognize there is less women than we could have in the IT market, and that Free Software may create more job positions as more and more industries and governments are starting to use free software. More than that, we believe some knowledge on Free Software tools may increase people skills when applying for any kind of job, even if it is not directly related to technology. For instance, if a secretary already knows OpenOffice, and wants to start working for a company considering a migration to Free Software, the odds are she will be well positioned when applying for the job.

Our other objective is geared towards our social activism [read the objective]. A lot of people do not have enough resources to have access to technology. Children, elders, and others don't have ways of accessing the wide range of information available through the Internet, for instance. We work with several different communities, as I will show you later, trying at least to give them a “taste of technology” through the usage of free software, and letting them know there are affordable alternatives they can use, when organized as a group, to “get connected”.

Our main actions involve training people that would not have access to information technology otherwise and also participate in events where we can show people easy ways of using free software in their lives and real worlds.

We use softwares such as TuxPaint and Gcompris as tools to help young children in their learning process. And we teach elders how to access the internet and also create and use e-mail accounts, how to produce texts using OpenOffice and other tools.

In the World Social Forum, 2003, we produced a workshop to needy children, the kids whose parents participate in the Landless Workers Movement, Unemployed Workers Movement and others.

Every semester at Univates we promote the Penguin's Week. In this week we invite people to talk about several aspects of free software usage to our students and the community. I will give you a couple of examples.

In this slide here you can see pictures of the children participating in the workshop we produced at the World Social Forum I mentioned before. We had a whole program for the children who would come to our workshop, start working with things they were used to, such as colored pencils, ink and paper, and then moving to computers with Debian Linux and TuxPaint installed. In the computers they were invited to use similar tools to the ones they worked before and try to create similar drawings.

It is always amazing to see how kids are not afraid of technology, and the beautiful things they produce eventhough never having had contact with computers before.

For those of you who have never seen TuxPaint and Gcompris before, here are the webpages for the projects and a couple of screenshots.

In this page, you see TuxPaint. It has an interface kids become very familiar with in a couple of minutes. After that, it is a whole discovery game kids never get tired of. There seems to be always another tool to be explored, and, of course, as the kids control the outcome (the actual drawing), they are the real artists. It is available in several languages.

Here is Gcompris. It was designed for preschool children, and it was conceived thinking it could be the first tools children would use, so it actually teaches children how to use the computer, coordinating the mouse movement with simple results on the screen, then teaching them how to type, how to recognize the numbers on the keyboard, and so on.

It has several mathematics, spelling, and recreational activities. You can spend several hours with it and it will never become boring for the kids. Gcompris provides several educational games that become more and more complex, helping the children's learning process.

This is just one screenshot of a “matching game”. Note the kid will have to associate the letter (in the main screen) with the mailbox (in the left menu, in yellow).

These are some of the things that happen in our Penguin's Week. In the left, you see Kov (Gustavo Noronha), a well known Debian Developer in Brazil. He was talking about the Hacker Culture.

In the right, the man in black is the belge, MIT Professor, Etienne Delacroix. He uses old, broken computers to create working pieces of technology as a form of art. His workshop is called “Free Hardware Workshop”. He builds with his students computers from scratch while teaching them concepts of computer architecture, electronics, operating systems and programming. From this workshop was born a partnership between our University and the University of Uruguay, and now professor Etienne is working with students from both Universities.

Here, you see some of our University students participating in the “Universidade Solidária” project. This project takes students in their vacation time to places in Brazil where you find needy communities. Standing up close to the computer is “Preta”, one of our Gnurias. They had a small computer lab in the city of Mucajaí, the state of Roraima, in the heart of the Amazon Forest. The computers were running Windows. She installed Tuxpaint on top of Windows and taught children how to use it. She also taught young people how to use office-like tools, so they could be better prepared when searching for a job.

Please note our group will preferrably use Free Software, and we will always install it when it is possible. However, we will use all available tools, even if no free software is available, to help people the best we can. Of course, in the meantime, we will be convincing people to switch to free software.

This pictures show a students's group that participated in our workshop at the Martin Luther School, in Estrela (a city next to Lajeado).

In the picture at the right side of the slide, the man in yellow, is Alexandre Taborda, our work partner in our co-operative, Solis. We call him a “Gnuria macho”! He helped us to give this workshop about the construction of basic webpages with the HTML language.The most interesting thing, though, was kids have stablished contact with a kind of “source code”. They could see the text they were writing in a plain text editor became graphics in a webpage. The youngsters liked it very much.

Close to Taborda, standing up, you see Josi, another Gnuria. Josi is a history student and also my co-worker. She also gives speeches at conferences talking about our work. She was recently at a Unesco conference in Peru, where she talked to more than 400 people.

Here you can see the kids of “Projeto Aprendiz”. This is a project that works with needy children, complementing their regular school work with music, art and other recreational activities. Withouth these activities, those children could be in endangered social situations, like being exposed to drugs, crime, etc. We have worked with the “Projeto Aprendiz” bringing the kids into our University labs, and teaching them how to use computers in a similar work we have produced at the World Social Forum I talked about in the beginning of my presentation. We again used tools such as Gcompris.

Here are some of our plans to the future. We are still a very small group, and we try to help people with our voluntary work in a way we can still have our regular jobs and studies. So, our plans are quite modest, but we try to make them very effective.

We want to start a sort of “adoption program” for a small school in our neighborhood. We will try to get them computers (or start with a school which already has some computers) and teach the teachers how they can use free software tools as a learning resource for the kids.

I don't know how to translate “Casa de Passagem”. It is a shelter home for women and their kids that have been exposed to danger situations (women that have been abused by their husbands, for instance). We will work along with voluntary shrinks, lawyers and other professionals trying to use the technology to help these women and their children, “reconnecting” them with the world and finding new activities and more help.

We have learned a lot from our workshops with kids, using tools such as TuxPaint, Gcompris, OpenOffice and others. We will be sharing this information with educators, kids and everyone else in a web portal we are working on. New ideas are welcome! We also plan OpenOffice workshops for young, needy adults. These workshops will better prepare them for the work market.

With this last slide, I wish to thank you for your patience, your attention and your forgiveness for my English. I also wish to thank again the organizers, and specially thank Pia Smith, who first told us about this conference and incentivated us to submit a paper. Thanks also to David Lloyd, who made sure I got here, helping me filling up the forms properly and getting a visa.

Now, I will ask you, if you do have any question, to formulate it in very slow English, and I will try to answer. Or, if you prefer, you can send me an e-Mail to joice@gnurias.org.br. I write in English better than I can speak.

Thanks!

2004-01-04T14:46:34