A classroom experience

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MenthaSuaveolens
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Location: Belgium

A classroom experience

Post by MenthaSuaveolens »

Our local linux-club could persuade an institute (involved in afterschool-education) to organize a course "Linux for beginners". 5 lessons of 2.5 hours each. The course was intended for newbies (almost having no computer-skills).
We were surprised to have 19 subscriptions for that course. The average age of the students was around 55. Our youngest student was 45 years old, our oldest was 72 years old.

3 of them installed Ubuntu before entering the course, the others had no clue (or were afraid to mess up their Windows-system) how to install linux. In the first session I talked about free software, open source, Richard Stallman and
of course Linus Torvals, Redhat (how you can make profits running a business dealing with open source), Ubuntu (Mark Shuttleworth), ... In the second part of the first lesson , I tried to explain how one can make a boot-able usb-stick with
a linux-distro on it (I recommended to use Linux Mint Cinnamon). It turned out that using the Windows-program Rufus was already an obstacle for one third of the students. This gave me an idea of the level of computer-skills of the students.

Lesson 2 was dealing with installing Linux on their laptop. Almost one half of the students notified me before-hand that installing was too far-fetched for them. So in the second lesson I asked the guy's of our linux-club to assist in the
installation-process. Well, It felt like some kind of an installation-party after all. There was only one 14 years old laptop where we could not install Linux Mint. We had to use the forcepae option and to install MX-linux instead.

The next lessons passed well and the people using LM Cinnamon were very satisfied with LM. The guy's who installed Ubuntu beforehand admitted that LM Cinnamon was more user-friendly than Ubuntu. I showed them how they could
eventually replace Ubuntu with Linux Mint (This isn't quite obvious for a novice user. One has to revert to manually selecting the partitions). Most of the students were surprised how easy to use a linux-desktop was.

In the last lesson I learned them how to install grammar-checking in LibreOffice (LanguageTool). Unfortunately, this part caused some consternation. The guy using MX-linux on his 14 years old machine, could install
LanguageTool directly into LibreOffice, where the LM and Ubuntu users had to install a JRE first. The students were willing to accept that, but what they could not understand at all, was the fact that the guy with his
14 years old laptop was running the latest version of LibreOffice (6), were they had to stick to an outdated version of LO on more recent and powerful computers running an up-to-date distribution.

This is a point of concern. Some common well known apps (LO, Gimp, ...) are really out-of-date. Let's hope that the LM-team will focus also on that issue. The novice doesn't have the skills to install software along the ones
that are stored in the repositories. I leaned my students that the software-centre was one of the big benefits in using a linux-distro.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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deepakdeshp
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Re: A classroom experience

Post by deepakdeshp »

If I have helped you solve a problem, please add [SOLVED] to your first post title, it helps other users looking for help.
Regards,
Deepak

Mint 21.1 Cinnamon 64 bit with AMD A6 / 8GB
Mint 21.1 Cinnamon AMD Ryzen3500U/8gb
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jimallyn
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Location: Wenatchee, WA USA

Re: A classroom experience

Post by jimallyn »

Well done, MenthaSuaveolens. I have LibreOffice 6.0.1.1 installed on Mint 17.3, and it works fine. I downloaded the .deb file from the LibreOffice website.
“If the government were coming for your TVs and cars, then you'd be upset. But, as it is, they're only coming for your sons.” - Daniel Berrigan
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catweazel
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Location: Australian Antarctic Territory

Re: A classroom experience

Post by catweazel »

MenthaSuaveolens wrote: Mon Mar 26, 2018 2:31 pm This is a point of concern. Some common well known apps (LO, Gimp, ...) are really out-of-date. Let's hope that the LM-team will focus also on that issue.
First, this isn't a Mint issue, it's an Ubuntu issue. Second, outdated software is why many of us use PPAs.
"There is, ultimately, only one truth -- cogito, ergo sum -- everything else is an assumption." - Me, my swansong.
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