I met the “Future Engineers” club of Fenway High School in Boston and gave them bootable USBs with SLAX.

Note, that this is not a random sample of high school students, but an after school club for students interested in technology and engineering. Nevertheless, they were impressive.

I learned a lot.

Most had already used Linux at some point.
Two had given talks on using Scratch.
I was pleased to see girls well represented in the group.

The first thing they wanted to do with it was customize.  One of them was a Gimp user and wanted to download Gimp. SLAX is not as easy to install things with.

One problem we had was that we were relying on CD’s that then pointed to the USBs. This worked fine except that the CD trays couldn’t be opened until the machine was fully booted to windows. This caused an annoying delay so the students learned how to open a CD drive with a paperclip.

Three students went home with USB keys and “boot helper” CDs.

Next steps.

The students need a system they can modify more easily and with more to explore.

Ideally I’d like to get Sugar on USB and give them that to play with.  The liked the XO I brought in and were intrigued by the concept of an operating system for learning and for small children.  As so many people have pointed out, this generation of young people are very service minded. I think they would enjoy being part of creating software for learning.   If the system has Scratch and Gimp on it, they should be able to do the things they want to do that they can’t do with the school computers.

Based on todays meeting here is what I think we need to get the Fenway Future Engineers testing Sugar on a Stick for us.

We need

1. Bootable Sugar USB
2. Boot Helper CD
3. Instructions on how to add an Apps such as GIMP
4. A Jabber Server for them to collaborate (nice to have)
5. A plan for how they can give feedback to the Sugar community in a useful, nonintrusive way.

Fenway has good computers.  I think if it boots on 500MB RAM we are fine.
This group understands that this is in Alpha and there maybe issues with losing data if the USB gets corrupted.

I think there are many computer clubs/tech clubs/engineering clubs in middle and high schools in the first world who would love to play with Sugar.  Its a great way to learn about operating systems and computers, learn about open source, play with computer programming learning tools, and to learn about education around the world. This seems like a great marketing approach for Sugar and for creating future open source developers and would dovetail well with the G1G1 program.