[ripe-list] RIPEng

Thank you Randy, you made the point I was trying to make, but I was probably too tired. 

On 5 February 2024 20:29:27 CET, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:
>folk have been teaching addressingm forwarding, LANs, routing, services
>workshops since 1988.  props to Alvise Nobile of ICTP who organized the
>first workshops.  folk such as the NSRC have vast open source materials
>and tools to teach these things.  no need to reinvent the wheel.
>

Exactly, there's lots of stuff already there. And I have seen many people starting to go for the problem and underestimating that not actually what to teach and with what tools is the hard part. The hard part is framing your audience and understand how to teach them.

>imiho, we need to make some initial scoping on audience.  do we want to
>target tweens and early teens with programming and computer concepts?
>or so we want to target older students who have grown up with laptops,
>the internet, and teach networking and services?  or ...
>
>my personal take is that there are a bunch of folk focused on serving
>the younger set and making the next generation of programmers and UI
>designers.  and that is not really our main bailiwick.  we should focus
>on network and services engineering.  but i am biased.
>

I agree. If we put our energy in this (and this is energy and time consuming) we should teach something very specific to our community. Many things are already there, we don't need to replicate them in a slightly worse way ;)

>to put my money where my mouth is (sorry for another idiom), i volunteer
>to teach basic routing, but need folk to help organise, recruit, ...
>and i don't think it is the ncc's role this season, as folk are beating
>the ncc up over budget.
>
Need to think about it a bit more. Happy to help. And just to be clear i dont have anything against hands on stuff with pi-style hardware. We did a basic networking track at one of the German free software conferences once with hardware demos. That's pretty cool, but we should do something networking/Internet related rather than "build your own puzzle on a RPI". That may imply a more adult audience but I may underestimate people.

Cheers,
Franziska