 All right, thank you all for showing up. This is my talk on how to train your minions. Because the only thing necessary for marketing to try and force for good geeks to do nothing. Right, space bar. Oops. And if you turn it on, I hear that helps too. Right, I work for a company called eBall Computing who kindly ferried me over here and who have been really, really helpful in my endeavors. I'm a father and uncle. I'm a geek. I'm an open source and open hardware advocate. I initially really liked the free as in beer approach of open source. But as many of you have probably realized, you get subverted by the free as in speech. And all of a sudden, you get it. And you realize why it's the right way to go about things. I used to be an Arkayla, a Cub Scout leader. One of the few organizations that still allows you to do stupid things with kids and where they might get hurt. When my kids started school, I did the usual canteen, volunteering, reading, helping out with not organizing. And then they got this massive pile of Lego they didn't know what to do with. So I came along to the classes and ran a couple of classes, one gig per classroom. Lucky enough to give a talk on that a little while ago. And yeah, so what have I been up to since? If you have questions, by the way, please raise your hands. One of the volunteers will ferry a microphone to you and feel free to interrupt me with questions. And I will feel free to make up answers as I go, maybe. Biggest question maybe is why would I be doing something like this? As I see it, there is a widening understanding gap between the technology we all use every day and the technology we understand. And it's at this point I usually wave around a smartphone and talk about GPS and SD memory and all that sort of stuff. But I've recently upgraded to a dumb phone, so I can't do that. But more and more technology is magical. It's not something you're supposed to or encouraged or even allowed to understand. It's just magic. And you're just supposed to accept it and pay the monthly contract fee and be happy with your lot. I've also found there are more and more things are being replaced with computers with a custom interface. I don't have a TV anymore. I have a rather low-powered computer with a rather big screen and a rather crappy wireless keyboard. That's what they sell now when they sell you a TV. And they also seem to think that a computer you can't patch is ideal for web browsing because they put a web browser on it. That's awesome. What's also awesome is apparently a whole bunch of these TVs could not watch. You couldn't watch TV on them because there was a DNS problem and they wanted to phone home on boot up and they couldn't do that. So yeah, lots of stuff is no longer stuff. It is a computer with funny I.O. that helps it do stuff. It is enabled and it is limited by software. So you've heard about model A camera and the model Pro camera and the only difference is in this one we didn't turn off raw image saving, stuff like that. If you don't understand the role technology and programming plays, people can get you with stuff like that. So I want to make sure that kids realize when somebody's trying to sell them snake oil, that kind of thing. Education, I could never be a teacher. It's a very tough job. But I can see like handing from all sides and precious from everywhere. But they're limited in their time. It seems like sometimes they have to focus on how to do something rather than what it is they're doing and why you should do it. There was a thing to a autobiography. Too lazy to read. I listened to e-books. And this guy made a set square. And he packed the sand and made the model and did all those things. And he ended up with a set square and he had no idea what it was or why he would want one or why anybody would want one. But he had one and he knew how to make it. And that's kind of happening with education. You're kind of focusing on this is the outcome we need versus these are the wonderful tools and this is one of the outcomes you achieve. And we're going to give you plenty of time to play around with it so you can discover some of the other ones. We also live in a world where stuff keeps getting locked up. Our collective culture is being locked up by big companies and turned into shiny products with shrink wrap. And our products that we buy for hundreds of dollars are being locked up by funny screws so that we can't get into them and we can't learn about them. And we can maybe learn with them if we're lucky but we can't learn about them because they're locked away and we're not supposed to be able to look at the man behind the curtain and discover what the magic is. A big turning point for me was when my son came home with homework on PowerPoint. And now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Challenger thing went up, came down a lot of pieces. There was a rather scathing critique of how PowerPoint was the perfect tool for not conveying information. In this case, don't do that, it's risky. But whatever. Time and language restrictions prevent me from going into much more detail but it's gotten worse in schools. Anyway, so that's the horrible part of the talk. Now, it's the fun stuff. This is what I'm trying to do. Hopefully a how-to, hopefully a little bit of a recruiting spiel to get some other people interested in doing this. And if you want me to summarize in one word how to do this, I would say be lucky. And if I was to give myself a little more credit, I would say luck is where preparation meets opportunity. So if you're ready with this and if an opportunity arises like your school gets a big pile of Lego then you have an opening. You can maybe do stuff. So you need geeklings, minions, henchkins, whatever you want to call them. You need a venue, henchpersons, helpers, excuse me, you need funding and it helps to have some sort of content to keep people amused. So geeklings, many ways to get these. The simplest is to bring your own. That's what I do and it works. You probably have friends of similar age who probably have kids of similar age as your kids and that really works well as well. You can go poaching. So if you're, say, a Cub Scout leader you can grab a couple of them, bring them along. Ask your kids to bring a friend. Eventually you might actually find there's sort of a bit of word of mouth and people come to you and say, hey, I've got some of these geeklings, can you take them too? I've actually been integrated into a home schooling thing. I'm sort of part of the curriculum which feels really weird. And you can do the old tear-off slips and come talk to me if you wanna do something or put a flyer up at school or something. So here are some geeklings I prepared earlier. Bonus points for, well, not sorry, when I say I, only two of those I prepared, other people prepared as far as I know. So, yeah, they're a great bunch. Most of them, not that one, but they're a big bunch. You need a venue and this is where I utterly lucked out because I got an awesome venue and I got it at a fantastic price. You need a space to work. You need power, not everybody is lucky enough to have LCA swag to power their computers so having power helps. Facilities are good. Internet is also good. A lot of stuff happens on the internet, apparently. And if you're gonna run your session over lunchtime, you need food. Preferably walk to somewhere, eat food, make mess, walk back, type food. Not come along, bring food, drop a roll of your keyboard, spill your drink across the table, type food. The first kind of food is much better than the second kind of food. Maybe not from a diet point of view but definitely from a mess point of view. Internet's interesting because you can route all the kids' computers through yours and then you can run something like EtherAPE and then you can tell one of the kids, go and visit a webpage. And then you say, that's the webpage you visited and I hope the font is small enough so nobody recognizes that I'm faking this demo. So one of these red lines is the webpage you visited and all the other red lines are friends they brought along, tracking cookies, advertisement, tracking pixels, all that sort of stuff. I've been told I should also show the kids' web logs and in fact what I'm interested in is they're kind of a semi-evil web server that pushes some JavaScript out and tries to interrogate the things so I can show the kids, look, every time you visit a webpage, this is the information you're providing to them. Yeah, so simple demos like that. EtherAPE is actually kind of cool because you can do things like say, oh, look, that one green line, that's secure, all the red lines are not. So when you go to what you think is a secure side and all these red lines pop up, that side's not secure anymore. The lines are very slowly turning green. So here I have the venue, half of it. It used to be known as the office lunchroom. My boss has very, very kindly allowed me the use of it on weekends and it has everything you could possibly wish for including a whiteboard and an air conditioner and a microwave and a fridge and fire extinguishers which we haven't needed yet but it's comforting to know they're there. So this picture is actually when the kids are sort of tearing apart the packaging and unwrapping a 3D printer that we got. So actually building it was almost as much fun as reading the New Zealand newspapers but it was an awesome session. I'll talk more about it later. If you are completely insane, you will try to run a session with 13 kids all by yourself. Don't do that. It's not good. It's not good for anybody. So what you should do is encourage one of your geeklings to bring a grown-up. Bride them with an offer of coffee. The grown-up, not the kid, the last thing they need is more caffeine. Bride them with an offer of coffee, maybe even a doughnut or something but it is fantastic not only from a sanity point of view, not only from a safety point of view but everybody out there knows something nobody else does and they can bring a skill or they can bring a story or a new perspective on something. So definitely do that. The most rewarding thing, one of the most rewarding things, the Monty Python skit, one of the many most rewarding things is when you see the geeklings helping each other. It can also be terrifying because you realize they're much better at teaching each other than you are at teaching them because they don't have to unlearn all this stuff and they don't have to sort of imagine away all the preconceptions of how things work. They just say, oh, no, you just do that and that and that and then it works or you just sit around and do stuff randomly for five minutes and just gather something. Oh, hey, I don't have time to do that. They do. And they have the motivation. Keep hitting the wrong space belt. Funding, again, your best strategy is to have a massive amount of luck. Get yourself a free venue, get yourself a shuttle worth flash grant. It is unbelievably low paperwork. I couldn't believe it. But for some reason they decided to give me some money to go and do stuff like this and that in the venue has really, really enabled a lot of this stuff. I'm not saying it's impossible without this, but it makes it a lot easier. For one thing, skipping ahead to the bottom of the slide, your sessions can be free as in beer or ginger beer as is appropriate for the children. Not having to worry about money makes it a lot easier and probably also legally a lot easier. But yeah, if you can get a venue, if you can get some funding from somewhere, that's brilliant. IAAASA approached me to do a course on Arduino and I got paid in bits, which was fantastic because we've now used those bits and projects. So when you're looking at a matrix display board and you think, oh, that's a bit expensive. Not if somebody gives it to you. And I've also gotten contributions from the parents. So, you know, quite flattering when you sort of get handed a gift card, a J car and you kind of think, wow, cool. I had fun and I get this. But what that's left me with is actually a very nice problem to have, which is what to do with all the lootimer massing. And what I've managed to, what I've been able to do is to contribute to a couple of charities. Education Pi provides Raspberry Pi's for educations for girls schools in Afghanistan. If you can find a project that ticks more boxes, let me know. I mean, that just had to be done. My son's school were funding a Cambodian orphanage, so we helped them out. I helped out use some of the funds to buy a raffle tickets at the LCA 2015 fundraiser. Purely from our touristy reasons, nothing to do with the awesome prize that's been given away. I just wanted to help out. And yes, so, you know, looking for something else. There's actually a really cool project where they're using Raspberry Pi's to count penguins in the Antarctic. And that might be the next thing we're supporting. It's kind of cool. Content, it's good to have some. The original Shuttleworth Flash Grant was to buy a bunch of Raspberry Pi's to hand out to kids. We also do Arduino. It is my introduction to open hardware. Hi, Kim, thanks. Kim introduced me to them many years ago when I needed a small little microprocessor to do stuff, and I was just terrified of having to buy cables and programmers and bits and pieces. And yeah, Arduino, fun. Yeah, we have a 3D printer, the previous version of the black one. We don't have the cool steampunk version. We get projects and kits. You know, sometimes it's a little J-Car kit or something that you put together. One of the geeklings went and got a wireless... Wireless doorbell hooked it up to his Raspberry Pi. When you go to his house, you press the button, he gets an email. And he did that mostly by himself. I will admit to helping, interfering a little bit here and there, but he did that mostly by himself. We have some robots. Cue, hint. We've assembled a different robot, and I'll admit that the only reason I come up to LCA is to pinch ideas and stuff. I'm going to be bringing some of these simple bots into the class, and we're going to be assembling a couple of those. There's another one there with a camera feed or some. I don't know where that's going, but that's cool. And before I get surrounded, a bunch of other little kits and things. Ras BMC, Arduino training kit. My nephew's mad on Ninja Warrior, so we made him a little Ninja Warrior timer with a great, big, great button that you can smash down on. Cool, fun stuff. Raspberry Pi, in case you have been living under a rock, is a little computer like this. Comes in four flavors, A, B, A plus and B plus. If you don't know which one you want, you want the B plus. You get that. You get an SD or a micro SD card. Four giga-large it will do. Why would you buy anything smaller than 16? You need power, apparently they're fussy on power and it causes lots of problems. But to be honest, I've powered them from everything from LCA swag to laptops to power supplies and phone chargers and they seem to be reasonably happy with that. You need keyboard, mouse monitor. They have an analog output, which I've never used, but they have a digital output which will talk HDMI or DVI. HDMI, fantastic. Into your TV, you get video and you get sound and you get data from the remote control. Back through the cable to your Raspberry Pi so you can use it as a media center. Not an overpowered media center, but a media center nonetheless. And I need a case and you need an operating system. These things are so dead simple to install, it's not funny. You go to that link, you download the file, you unzip it onto an SD card, which you plug into the Raspberry Pi booted up and it just sort of walks you through installing your operating system. And if you totally noodle it, you just reboot it, hold down the shift key and it walks you through reinstalling your operating system. So it's like a recovery partition on your laptop. So I mean, these things are dead simple and for different audience that might be impressive, but you guys already know that. So this is what I got. These are pictures out of a guide I drew up for the kids for how to assemble and install and their own Raspberry Pi, their own computer, which you get the Pi, the power supply, the cable. They end up with what's on the right there. That's a B, the B plus has a micro SD card instead. Really recommend you go for that because that SD card sticks out a fair way and it's a little bit vulnerable. So you end up with a little computer, which runs Linux. The default distro is Raspbian, a Raspberry flavor of Debian. Raspbian C is XBMC running on it to give you a kind of a media center, which is fun to play with. One of the geeklings set that up and then went off and read guides and found plugins for it and managed to get a whole bunch of stuff working on it that I kind of looked at and I thought, oh, that'd be interesting. And one day when I'll have some time, I'll do that. And he went off and did it, so that's cool. There are others, PyDoro, Art Linux, a whole bunch of other choices. Last LCA, there was a talk on how to do your own minimal distros, which fits in a couple of dozen megabytes. You can do it really easy, Noobs, Raspbian, or you can have as much fun with them as you want. What do you get? You get Scratch, which I will talk more about later because it's way too awesome to be contained in one word. You get Python, you get G-Compre. If you have kids, go get G-Compre. It's wonderful. It has a massive range of activities. The simplest one is you hit both space bars at the same time and the little ball rolls to the little penguin and the penguin goes, yay. And if you get the timing wrong, it rolls off to the side. And it goes from there to a whole bunch of other activities and it ends up with, here's a diode and a battery and a light and a rear stat and a resistor. Go and wire them up and blow the light bulb and stuff. So there's a massive amount of content in there and it's really fun and simple. To be honest, it's a little slow on the Py, but it runs on other bigger platforms as well. You also get Minecraft, including a Python API and examples on how to do it. And this is one of the fun things where you can show kids what you can actually do when you can program and when you can control things with a bit of code because you can program a rain cloud that follows Minecraft, Steve around, rains on them at all times. That's kind of fun and gets the imagination going. If you're an older kid, it has GCC, Git, Emacs, all the fun things a geek needs to make himself feel at home and start doing stuff. And I found out yesterday, you can run Freedombox on it. Yes, guess what I'll be doing when I go home. The Raspberry Pi also has a really nice hardware interface. It has lots and lots of GPIO. Warning though, it is 3.3 volts and it's fairly low powered. So you must make sure you keep the magic smoke contained entirely within the Raspberry Pi. But a bit of prototyping board, couple of wires, an LED, a resistor or two, and you can have blinking lights and things like that or a wireless doorbell hooked up into it, which will send you an email when there's someone at the door. You can get daughter boards for the Raspberry Pi, Trig's talk, the autopilot thing. They are now called hats. That's a kind of a standard thing as of A plus and B plus. Two of them that I've used myself, which aren't actually hats, they're more simple. The PiFace digital, which gives you a couple of relays and a couple of buttons and a couple of open collector outputs. And this micro stack thing, which you can plug a GPS and accelerometer and a bunch of other things into. The PiFace is very useful when you have a really crappy home router that you have to power cycle in order to reestablish into that connectivity because you just have a little script that says ping, fail. Okay, I'll just turn that off and on again. Yep, ping that works. Okay, I've got internet again. Reduces support calls, which is handy when you're overseas. There's also a camera. Now you get USB ports so you could plug in a webcam, but there's a, in fact, I think that one's got it. There's a camera you can plug in as well, which plugs in through a bus with hardware magic and things which is lower level than I usually care about, which gives you some fairly good images. Loads of fun stuff to do. Now, this thing is supposed to be the spiritual successor of the BBC Micro. It's designed for education and there is so much stuff out there for education for it. Guides like this, you know, grad three wires and LED and a resistor and you can make a traffic light. There is so much stuff out there that makes it so simple to use this in a kind of a classroom environment or just playing with your kids at home or something. Someone else has done all the work for you. Go and use it. Scratch. Scratch is graphical programming. You drag and drop blocks onto the screen and rearrange them and connect them up together. It is digital Lego. And as somebody who's played with Lego his entire life, that is high praise. It's really easy to install. You can even run it in a browser. It allows you to control the GPIO pins. Again, this is something one of the geeklings figured out. I looked at it and thought, that's cool. And when I have time, I'll do that. And one of the geeklings said, yeah, that's cool. I'm going to invest the time and do that. So he read the guides and got the extra packages and all that sort of stuff. And now he had a program running on his Raspberry Pi where he could click things on the screen and lights would go on and off. It is unspeakably wonderful. It is a wonderful introduction to computers and to the idea that you can control the game, the world, the computer. One of the kids wrote a game where a bowl of pasta has to dodge dropping tomatoes. Maybe he doesn't like pasta sauce. I don't know. Who would ever write a game like that? No one, but he did, because he wanted one. So he wrote it. And that's the only way he was ever going to get a game where you can be a bowl of pasta dodging, falling tomatoes, because you're not going to get that from anybody else. So that's kind of like what I'm... You don't have to accept what people give you. You can make your own stuff, even if it's digital. It's really, really wonderful, except version two runs on Adobe Air, which is on the Richter scale of bad. It's Guido shooting. It's bad, but version one's cool. One of the parents put me onto this. It's an old book. It's free for use in an educational setting. And it's just a bunch of figures which you are supposed to draw with logo, scratch, Python, whatever. And it starts really simple. It's a square, and then it's a rectangle, and then it's something, and then something else. And as you go through it, you can start introducing things like loops, or maybe even things like functions. And you can start to build up an appreciation of who's a software engineer. What I do all day is I use simple things to make slightly less simple things. And this is what, yeah, it has some really cool shapes and you can work through them. Again, some of the kids, they went and implemented all this stuff in scratch, which ended up with these massive programs because every step is like a block that you put underneath the other block. But they did it, and they persisted, and they got it all done. Really impressive. Arduino, my introduction to open hardware. If you've been born under a rock, you don't know what Arduino is. It's a little microprocessor, which you can program with a USB cable, which is brilliant because you get this thing, you plug it in, you download the IDE, and within five or 10 minutes, you can make lights blink. And you can have a real world effect on the real world. And more importantly, the kids can have a real world effect on the real world. The idea that a computer isn't just something you swipe your fingers across, a computer is something that can control real stuff, and it doesn't get much simpler than Arduino. If you want to support a fellow West Islander, go and get this kit from Freetronics, but there are clones everywhere. And there are schematics everywhere. If you want, you can build your own. Can't quite 3D print it yet, but Vic's working on it. So you get five volt GPIO, you get an I2C bus, you get an SPI bus, which may or may not have support yet. Analog the digital converter, pulse width modulation, which is kind of a cheap digital analog. You also get daughter boards, they're called shields. There are shields for everything, but you can also make your own. And it comes with a real simple used Java IDE, which does run a little bit slow on the Pi. But that's all right, you can run that on anything. If you're really lucky, you get to play with a 3D printer. I don't quite have the steampunk one, but I've got the earlier version of the one before it. And this is a New Zealand product, it's wonderful. It's wonderful as a company that makes it because they're really helpful. And it's a wonderful example of what Open Hardware is capable of. Cause I came in here and I saw the version too, and I'm like, oh wow, this is really cool. Oh yeah, they changed that a bit, and this has evolved a bit. And you can really see evolution of things and lots of little ideas building together to make a product that's altogether better. This thing, in the state you see it now, was entirely assembled by the kids. This is them tearing the packaging off in that earlier photo. They managed to build this thing, and there's actually also the carriage, which is not in shot, but this is 12 to 14 year old kids who managed to get the printer to this stage without any problems. Then I tried to do the rest, got into trouble, needed some help, got it. But yeah, really, it's something they did. And in case you don't know much about 3D printing, I knew a little bit, but you have loads and loads of different programs. They produce files called STL files, stereolithography files, and then you print them and you make stuff out of them. So you can just go to Thingiverse and download something, you can use Google SketchUp, you can use all kinds of programs. I personally, I'm a programmer, so I use something called OpenScad, where you use primitive objects to describe what it is you want to do. A rectangle here and take out a triangle there and bolt a square onto that part, build up your shape like that. But the thing is, it's a wonderful example of, it doesn't matter where the data comes from, as long as you can have an open format in the middle, you can do something with it. It's not like, oh, we've bought a proprietary 3D printer and the only thing you can do with it is print the things that you can download from our website or that you can write with our proprietary 3D CAD. This is open, the hardware and the software. And that's not even the most awesome bit. Most awesome bit is, okay, so the fan on top with the bracket is the first thing we successfully printed. We thought we had an overheating problem and we thought the fan was kind of positioned slightly badly because of the ribbon cables blocking the air. So we went to the whiteboard and we said, how can we make a bracket that'll reposition that fan? And we got calipers out and we measured the thickness of the wood and the position of the holes. And one of the kids got a CAD program that they were licensed to use from school and he started drawing this shape and the thing here and there and the holes and how do we hold it together? And we printed this and we solved the problem. We actually solved the real world problem, sorry, the kids actually solved a real world problem with the 3D printer and there it is. Turns out we were wrong. There's nothing wrong with the overheating, but I'm not gonna take that off. That's cool. The fan's staying right there. So the next thing of course you do is if you have a train obsessed, nephew is you draw up some adapters to allow them to use as Duplo for his train tracks to make bridges and gender benders because you never get enough gender benders. It's a 3D printer, so you have to print a name tag. I'm sure that's written down somewhere. And then you say, then one of the kids says, oh, I wanna make a cup holder that I can clip onto the window in the car. And that's another wonderful opportunity to start talking about, okay, how big does the lip at the back have to be? Well, it doesn't have to be very big because it just has to hold it in place. And what about the front? Does it have to be solid? No, it just has to be strong enough to support the weight. And then you talk about, well, when we actually go to print this thing, it doesn't really matter where we put the hoop, but when we go to print it, it'll be a lot easier if we put it at the top and print it upside down. And you don't do it as clumsy as I just did it. You just have a discussion with the kids and talk to them about it and kind of point out, oh, hang on, yeah, no, that's a problem. And you have them solve the problems. And you end up with a design like that, which we printed out, which works, if you have the exact right size cup. But that's okay, because it's open-scarred and you can just change the program, make it a different size. But again, you don't have to accept the world, you can create it as you go. And if it does work, you change it. After you've done lots and lots of stuff, you can do a calibration piece, just for the heck of it. That one's designed to take West Island coins to let you know whether your printer's actually printing the size you thought it was printing. And then you get to do your son's science homework because you print two of those and you stick them together and you say, model of an atom, I'm not coming to school with a hydrogen, this is a carbon-13, man. Not that I would ever do my son's homework. I mean, that's obviously not something a parent should ever do. Progress. Okay, so I've had 30 of these sessions. It's gonna be 29, but I thought, no, I have to have a nice round number to put on a slide, so I had another quick session before I came out here. I have a core group of geeklings who are pretty much at every one. We have done a handful of projects, hoping to do a couple more. Oh, I completely forgot to mention this. The little robots, that was Tuesday's open hardware mini conf. This thing, it was Monday's open radio mini conf. This is also something I want to do. I just come to LCA to steal ideas to take home and show the kids, so that's why I'm here. So this is all stuff that I want to do, projects, robots, radios, things. So we've done a bunch of projects, wanna do a whole bunch more. We've managed to contribute to some worthwhile causes, I hope, maybe even win a printer. I mean, help out some more, nothing to do with a printer. Yeah, so, did I warn you that this is a recruiting pitch? I would like somebody else to try this. Not to say nobody else is trying this. There are lots of other people trying this, but I wanna get in touch with other people who are trying this, so we can cooperate and learn from each other's mistakes and point at each other and laugh. I need more ideas, I need more projects, and I should probably explain that last one. It might be taken out of context. Of my seven or so core geeklings, two of them are girls, which gives me a better gender ratio than any place I've ever worked at, but it's not good enough, and I need to figure out how to fix that. We have some serious problems, and we need some serious brains, and we can't just exclude half of them based on gender. That's just dumb. Okay, so I've actually grabbed a whole bunch of you guys talking about some of these things, how you can help me out. If anybody else has any ideas, let me know. But yeah, my aim, make it more fun. To be brutally honest, the other thing I come here for is inspiration because sometimes it's a bit of a slog, but surrounded by like-minded people who get it, and when you say, I do open, they say, oh yeah, I get that, you don't have to spend the next 10, 16 minutes. This is awesome, so it's kind of recharging the batteries. So a really long list of people to thank my boss for providing the venue, and for shipping me here, but that might be so, he gets some peace and quiet for a week, I don't know. Shuttleworth Foundation for funding me, MineKids for the printer and the support. Anyone and everyone doing open software or open hardware, and there's a lot of you in this room. So thank you, because your stuff is the stuff that I blatantly copy and then sort of pass off as my own work in front of the kids. Thanks for that. The henchpersons, you know, the parent helpers who come along and share ideas and help me with the whip and chair to get the kids into line, and of course the geeklings. And I couldn't quite bring myself to say, and of course my family and my high school science teacher, because then it sounds like an Oscar acceptance speech, but I want to thank them too, because they were awesome. So I'll leave that up there. OGPC, one geek per classroom, that's my wiki, that's my email address in case you have questions or suggestions or I'm mad enough to try something like this. And that being the last slide, are there questions? Can you say anything about ages or the appropriate age to start doing this? I have a couple of geeklings myself, but they are not completely literate yet. Ah, okay, so at what age can you start and what age do you finish? I'm 43, I don't think I'm finished. And my kids, something like the, you know, hit both space bars at the same time in the ball rolls, you can probably start really early, depends on the kid. Something like scratch, some of the guides are really simple, like grab the green block and then put a blue block under it and the cat changes color from blue to green. I don't think the limit is the age of the kid, but they're interest. So try something, if they're interested, try more of it. If not, give up and despair. I mean, no, try again a little bit later. So they will surprise you. You will think, no, there's no way they can get that, they're too young for it. And then somebody comes and says, no, I've done it. So I don't know, there's no age guidelines for half of this stuff. It's just try it and if it works, you do more of it. If not, you try something else or you try it again later. Firstly, thanks for that talk. It's incredibly encouraging. And I've got two small girls and I'm also looking for ideas on how to encourage them into our community and like-mindedness. And this is now not a question, but it's more for everyone here. I would really, really like to see a geek parenting mini-conf at next year's LCA. So we can share ideas, come up with that sort of whole day of this. So yeah. More questions. It's the last day, keep the runners going, come on. Have you had any interaction with the scientist in school program CSROs running? I have not. I have probably mostly through failings of my own done too much on my own. I mean, anyone dumb enough to try to hurt 13 kids by themselves? I mean, they're not all there. So yeah, there are probably lots of resources out there and scientists in schools, that's one I'm gonna remember and I'm gonna see what they've got. Yeah, just briefly for everyone else's infrastructure, CSRO has a program misnamed scientists in schools. And they essentially they'll pair scientists, mathematicians, IT people with teachers who are looking for similar skills. Okay, cool. In regards to with the girls, what we've tended to do, done it through university and also other in the States and stuff is actually have all women there. So we've got all women technical people there. And then we've also got all girls because a lot of them will tend to go to some of the things and there's only one or two girls there. Yeah, it's intimidating. That's one of the bits of feedback I've got. It's also like pulling them in to like just an all girl space for a week or whatever not to kind of do a bit of that intensive stuff can be really good. And as I said with other women who are in the industry there as well, it's quite encouraging for them. Try finding some other women in the industry. Sorry? Try finding other women in the industry. Yeah, we 12 of us ran it in one in Seattle recently and there's quite, yeah. So there is women out there in the industry doing it. No, I'm sorry. That sounded really horrible and dismissive. No, it's all right. I don't know. Whereabouts are you based out of curiosity? I'm an Adelaide. Adelaide. Okay, so I thought so. The University of Adelaide, I'm part of a research project with that where we're actually doing training and specifically with kids on the spectrum. So I don't know if you might want to also speak to the University of Adelaide to kind of, they're looking for some extra IT mentors in. Yeah, track the email. Adelaide, I believe itself. And also just one other thing with the one positive thing that the current government has said is they've announced X amount of million interstem stuff. Have you considered approaching the government for a grant or I'm just curious about why, I never heard of the Shutterworth fund. I'm just curious why you took that direction, the funding. I'd never heard of it either. To be honest, it was something that appeared on a mailing list I'm on, Hacker Space Adelaide. And I thought for a laugh, yeah, I'll put my hand up. Expecting to be drowned in reams of paperwork, but I'm actually the next thing that happened is there was a transfer into my bank account. It was really that simple. It was eerie and massively helpful. Was there, yeah, one more? One more question. Have you looked at anything lessons from Code Club and they started in the UK. They've recently had a launch in Australia. I don't know what they're doing, but they're trying to set up clubs around Shafiq for young kids to learn some programming. They've got lessons on Python and Scratch and HTML. Yeah, yeah, there's loads of stuff out there. There's like web-based Python programming things where you solve things in your browser and it tells you stuff. Code.org, things like that. There was, funny, there was this, there were IT problems disguised as real-world problems. So things that, you know, a program would say, ah, yes, that's a binary tree, but they kind of said with beavers and dams or something like that. I printed that out for the kids. That was from a UK program or something. Left one lying around the office and some of the programmers said, oh, how do you solve that one? So, yeah, there's loads of stuff out there. If you have some really cool suggestions, email them to me, I would. Oh, well, I can actually couple some kids with First Lego League, I don't know. Let's just, just programming with Lego, Dragon Drop, but it's actually like robots and so like World War competition and the kids have a lot of fun. Okay, so I didn't catch all. First Lego League. First Lego League. That's for nine to 14-year-olds. Like Dragon Drop, Lego Mind Souls programming, but you're moving a robot around the table doing various things. Sounds brilliant, yeah. All right. All right, so we have run out of time, but I'm sure that you guys can all talk about this at some other point in your life. For the rest of the conference. And it will be cool, yeah. Almost done. So, on behalf of the LCA team, we have a small gift for Thomas as a thank you for speaking. Thank you so much. And another huge round of applause.