Childs Play

I'm used to a feeling of a sense smug satisfaction when I've slipped a couple of extra vegetables in a meal and the children haven't noticed. “Mmmm, this is delicious Mum. I love Spaghetti Bolognaise.” Little do they know they're actually eating mushrooms, peppers, garlic, onion and probably carrot (all of which they claim they dont like). Blend it all in with the tomatoes and the mince beef; voila....sneaky vegetables (hee, hee). We've now had Ubuntu on the laptop for over a month and the kids haven't even noticed. They're happily playing away on their usual Cbeebies website and haven't noticed a change other than discovering there are more games on the 'puter' than before.

This has made me contemplate how many people can I sneak this on to....successfully? The parents have to be next. My parents are from an era of getting married and having children young and so are still relatively young themselves. Old enough to be fairly stuck in their ways, but young enough that their fine motor skills and hand eye co-ordination are are at 90% peak. I'm sure I could get them to make the change.

I've noticed that there's a fair amount of parent / child competitive behaviour that takes place in families. The open source community should take advantage of these feelings to gain the market lead in the home Operating System. You can guarantee if the kids get into something, the parents will become involved as well. We may hate to admit it, but those of us with children end up knowing as well as any child information from what colour power ranger is the coolest, the names of the Teletubbies and the turtles, to who lives in what colour house on Balamory. Although I haven't quite worked out the full extent of the rules in YU-GI-OH, I believe that 'OS Top Trumps' would work fantastically in upping the general knowledge of kids and their respective parents across the UK. Categories and ratings of ease of installation, size of installation, configurability, default look, ease of use for GUI, range of packages, number of packages, security, cool film exposure etc...and of course there would also have to be a Japanese style cartoon to back this up, may be with a guest appearance from Linus himself ;-) This is could be the next school kid craze! (remember – you heard it here first, folks) Maybe we can slip a couple of those free educational packages on the system at the same time.

There are loads of great resources and suggestions at http://www.lugod.org/presentations/kidslinux/. With so many fantastic educational packages available, it beggars belief that our local 'cash strapped' comprehensive school spent a small fortune on kitting out a new IT lab in Microsoft products from head to toe. I now have a favourite question that I ask any person/business I come across who uses a computer. “What operating system do you use? and why did you choose it?”. So I thought I'd put this question forward to our local school to see what kind of response I'd get. I wasn't quite as impressed with the answer as I'd hoped. “We use Windows. Uh Dunno why, seems to be the standard really. We've got 180 computers, and Microsoft is what we know”. I wont name and shame our local school and the unenthusiastic teacher for fear of it being taken out on the children of friends and family who attend! This is a school just like thousands of others across the UK that are run on extremely tight budgets where you can guarantee you'll find flaky paint, antiquated heating systems, collapsed ceilings and appalling school dinners. But don't worry, because they've got a great Microsoft I.T lab!...lets just hope its not the room with the leaky collapsed ceiling!

We should take a leaf out of this schools book. Parkhill Junior School in Essex have built a most fantastic Internet resource facility. The school has been using a bank of recycled computers running open source applications since July last year. The computers, which are five year old Pentium II Viglen PCs are more than adequate for what they are being used for and the whole suite was fitted for less than £1K including fixtures and fittings (http://tinyurl.com/b6d2j). This is a school who also has to work within a tight budget...but they are being very sensible about what and where they spend the schools money. If this isn't a reason to get yourself along to your child's school PTA meeting, I don't know what is....and if you haven't got children, then I guess you can either just sit back and relax or adopt one and join in the grumble!