I had been hearing about ByteStruck a lot for close to one year. This is how I came across PACE GLUG in Mangalore. Unlike any other Free Software fest or conference, atleast that I know of, which generally targets graduate students or working professionals, the participants of ByteStruck are actually high school and pre-university students. The event aims to introduce students at a very young age to computer programming and Free Software ideology.
My usual interaction with school students are through the community centers that FSMK runs. The centers attract students from lower middle class or poor families who are generally completely new to computers. Many of them would have used a computer only at schools with very little understanding of its usage or internals. The centers are run with the aim to introduce these students with various usages and internals of computer and actually allow them to play with and explore computers at the centers. We have been quite successful in this effort and many of the students are very comfortable in using and understanding the systems. Some of them are now trying to get into the internals of the system. By this effort, we had hoped to see if we can in anyway try to control the increasing digital divide between the haves and have nots.
With this context, ByteStruck was a different experience for me where I actually met the other side of the high school student population. ByteStruck to its credit has now become a major event in Mangalore region and attracts the best of the students from some(if not, all) premier schools and pre-university colleges who mostly(hoping that I am not over-generalizing) come from upper middle class and rich families.
The brief interaction with the students during the event helped me understand the extent of the digital divide that exists currently in the society. On one side where we are happy to introduce office tools and browser to students in their 12th std or doing their B.Com/B.Sc, the students here were already talking about Android App Development, Spoofing web pages and flashing Mint on memory card and using it on a Raspberry Pi and these are students just in their 9th or 10th grade. Not only did all of them had used Wikipedia for completing their school homework before, they also had social networking accounts and email addresses. Many of the schools which participated followed syllabus from CBSE and hence all the students were familiar with the idea of open source(I was told that they have it as a chapter in Class 9th).
This event was an eye opener for me of how much we are loosing in the fight against the digital divide present in the country. Not only do we have to start working more actively with our community center students giving them much exposure, we also need to engage with them at a younger age and get them to explore computers and internet themselves. A major challenge that needs to be addressed is to allow students as much time as possible with the systems. This will then allow them to probably come over the idea that computer is only to play games and they will start exploring computer for other things(It took me over 2 years after having my own system to realize it. :)).
Archives: November 2013
November 21, 2013
November 12, 2013
ByteStruck, a wonderfully organized Free Software event
ByteStruck is an event conducted by PACE LUG Mangalore for the high school and pre university students. Being conducted for last 6 years, it has been able to attract the best of the students from in and around Mangalore and now the schools are competing with each other to prepare their students and win ByteStruck.
The philosophy of ByteStruck is to introduce students at a very young age to programming and Free Software ideology. On these lines, a competition using any basic programming language or prototyping environment like Scratch or Alice is used. Students are given a theme on the spot of competition and using the free software tool are supposed to present their ideas. Teams of two students compete against each other in two categories, one for high school students and another for pre-university students.
The event attracts school students to the campus of PACE College and this way, college is able to show case their infrastructure and facilities to the students and there by encouraging students to choose the college if they decide to do engineering. Schools and pre-university colleges are happy to compete against each other and show case the competency of students. Students themselves see the event as something different than the other competitions that they usually participate and hence are thrilled to come and take part in the competition. Thus in a beautiful culmination of interests of all the different parties involved in organizing the event, the PACE Linux User’s Group is able to spread the message of free software and encourage students to learn different aspects of computer programming at a very young age.
On the organizing part, the event involves hard work of hundreds of volunteers involved in various aspects of the event. Once the free software tool which will be used for the competition is finalized, some volunteers are involved in the preparing and collecting learning material for the students. This year Scratch and Alice were selected as the tools for competition for high school and pre-university students respectively. All this material is then packed into a CD/DVD and then hundreds of such CD/DVDs are written to be distributed to various schools. The volunteers this year visited close to 150 schools in and around Mangalore region and as far as schools in Kasaragod. This is one of the major activity involved in the organizing of the event and it is overwhelmingly supported by all the students of all semester of CSE/IS department in the college. Each school interested in participating in the event have to assign a school teacher as a guide for the students and the teacher is responsible for all the coordination with the participants along with registration and transportation activity. Registrations can be done usually over phone but this year, even online registrations were accepted on their website http://bytestruck.in Each school is allowed to send maximum of 5 teams for each category. Around 100 teams for high school category and 50 teams for pre-university students registered this year.
On the big day of ByteStruck, the transportation department of the organizers starts picking students from various pick up points around the city using the College Buses. The college itself being in the outskirts of the city, providing transportation helps the participants and also ensures that the students can reach the campus on time. A school teacher is expected to accompany students which helps in ensuring discipline amongst the participants. Once in campus, participants are expected to confirm their registrations at the registration desk and then served breakfast.
The teams are then sent to different labs. Due to the great response this year, 6 college labs had to be prepared for the event, 4 for high school students with all the systems having Scratch installed in them and 2 labs for pre-university students with Alice installed in all the computers. Unfortunately the platform used for organizing the event is currently Windows as the organizers did not get permission to install any GNU/Linux based distribution in some of the labs. Thus to maintain uniformity, the organizers decided to run the competition with Windows as the platform. Once assembled in the labs, students are given a theme for each category and in next two hours they are expected to come up with prototypes representing the themes using the free software tool. This year themes were “Newton’s Third Law” and “Two friends stuck in an island” for high school and pre-university students respectively. Once the stipulated time for the competition is over, judges go to each team judging on various factors on how well the prototypes matched the given theme and how well the same was presented.
Lunch is then served to participants while the judges and organizers finalize the results. Since many students come from far off schools early in the morning, it is important to provide lunch to all the participants as many of them wouldn’t get a chance to bring their lunch boxes. After Lunch, one hour of discussion on one or two free software topics beneficial to the students is planned. This year, Wikipedia and Stellarium were the two topics.
This is then followed by closing ceremony where the eagerly awaited results are announced. Apart from top 3 teams in each category, the best guide school teacher in each category is also recognized.
Over all, ByteStruck is one of its kind FOSS event organized across the country. It is able to attract best of the students in the region, get very good support from the college authorities and most importantly a very dedicated and passionate team to organize.
For more info on ByteStruck – http://bytestruck.in
