Quik

Could mean essentials you wouldn’t want to live without, neat little things you just found, all time favorites— really whatever comes to mind.

I am a student in Germany myself and got the rare chance to influence the education about CS/responsible use of technology people get in a special course I will give for the interested in my school this year.

The students will be eight grade and up, and it is a reasonable assumption that I will not have to deal with uninterested students (that and the probably small course size gives me an edge over normal courses beyond my actual planned lessons).

My motivation for investing substantial amounts of time and effort into this is my deeply hold belief that digital literacy is gonna be extremely important in the future, both societally and personally. I have the very unique chance to do something about this, even if only on a local level, and I’m gonna use that. I fail to see the current CS classes in German "high schools" (Gymnasien), and schools with our specialization (humanism) especially, provide needed education. We only had CS classes from grade eleven—where you learn Scratch or something similar and Java basics (most don’t really understand that either, or why you should learn it (a circumstance I very much understand)).
This state of affairs, and the increasing prevalence of smartphones instead of PCs means most students lack any fundamental understanding of the technology they’re using everyday.
My reason to believe that I’d be better at giving CS lessons than trained teachers is that these have to stick to very bad specific guidelines on what to teach, and a lack of CS graduates wanting to become teachers means our school has not a single one who studied any CS (I did).

Some of my personal ideas:

• how do (basically all) computers work hardware-wise (overview over parts)
• what is a computer/boot chain/operating system/program
• hand out USB drives/cheap SSDs to students that they can keep (alternative: a ton of VMs and Proxmox users of one of my hosts) and have everyone pick and install their Linux distro of choice (yes, this is gonna be painful for all involved, but is also—as I suspect many of you already know—extremely rewarding and can be quite fun)
• learning some "real" programming (would probably teach Python), my approach would be to learn basics and then pick projects and work alone or together (which is useful for learning Git/coding in a remotely readable way)
• some discussion of open/closed source, corporate tech, enshittification, digital minimalism and philosophy of technology (which would be okay because, you know, humanistic school…)
• maybe some networking (network stack, OSI, hacking Wifi networks…)

What are your thoughts and suggestions? Took me some time to get to an agreement with the school over this, so I’d like to do my absolute best.

Possibly relevant questions: what fundamental knowledge about tech do you suspect to be still relevant 15 years from now, what would you like to have learnt, what would you find interesting as a student this age…

for everyone interested (hopefully obvious /s)

Kind of incredible, and really surprising as far as I can see :)

Hi, I've been searching for a Linux tablet/convertible to use at school and university for quite a while and would like to hear your recommendations, if you have any.

I have a pretty strict set of requirements, those are:

• 6GB RAM
• 4 core CPU
• stylus support
• magnetic keyboard with German layout
• somewhat reasonable battery life (6h of note taking would be great)

I will mostly use the device for coding, taking notes, web browsing, document editing and watching stuff online. I am not afraid to do some work to get my device to be usable (e.g. port an Android driver if really necessary), but would prefer to be able to use the device as fast as possible (as one can probably imagine). I do not expect a perfectly usable out-of-the-box experience, as I know that's not to be expected with mobile Linux. My maximum budget is 700€, but that does not mean I necessarily want to spend that much.

Some devices I've found specifically made to run Linux: PineTab 2: No stylus support, not for me. FydeTab Duo: No German layout, not being shipped yet (and kind of unclear when it will) Starlite Mk 5: Really cool device imo, but there are no reviews as it hasn't been shipped yet

I've also been exploring the PostmarketOS devices page a bit, but only found the Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro which looks good so far, but I might have to reach out to the device maintainer to find out more about the bluetooth status.

Edit: You’ve all recommended x86 devices/convertibles (which kind of makes sense) and I also found some of them:

• Surface devices: seem to work pretty well, although I would prefer not to support Microsoft
• IdeaPad Flex and Duet: Both seem like good deals, the Duet 5i looks especially interesting to me as it’s more of a "true tablet"

Are some of you daily driving Linux tablets? Do you recommend doing this at all? Do you have device recommendations? Thank you all a lot for your time and effort!