My pensieve

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. :)).