On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 11:07 -0300, Juan Carlos Gentile Fagundez wrote:
I had an experience like that in Argentina (Posadas, Misiones) some years back. I started with a laboratory for around 20 kids (from 5 to 12 around) on free software during holiday time (not official school time). Just a lab 3 hours weekly (usually we worked more than proposed time reaching 6 7 hours) and for 2 month.
One of the resault was that 3 kids of 8,9,10 years old, after coming to the lab, refused to go to the normal school lab (when the normal school started again) with m$ window$. The president of the school called me to migrate to free software the complete school for 1500 kids. In the other hand during the lab many many parents come to me also because kids at home wanted to have FS. After that also parents asked me to have a lab for them. If we migrate brains (youngs kids). The ´thing´ is done.
Thank you, Juan. You are right. Once we are able to introduce FS to children, and show them, train them, in FS as long as they are in school, at least many of them will stick with FS. We also have an interesting experience. In Calicut (Kozhikode) University, the person in charge of the Computer Centre installed Windows in ten machines and GNU/Linux in another ten machines that were kept there for the staff and students to browse the Internet. Initially, everyone used the Windows machines, if they were not occupied. But when all Windows machines were occupied, they had to use the machines with GNU/Linux. After some time, people first looked for the GNU/Linux machines, and went to Windows machines only if the others were occupied! They simply found that the GNU/Linux machines worked better and faster!
Regards