Teckids: The Free Software Youth Organisation

Teckids is a youth organisation from Germany, aiming at establishing a free software community among children and adolescents (basically pupils). Regularly running youth programmes at FOSS conferences where children take part in workshops about many aspects of technology and computer science, Teckids provides the necessary entry level to the free software community. Being a community organisation for young people, Teckids entirely relies on engaging those young people in all aspects of the organisation, starting from tutoring in workshops up to participating as board members. This concept brings a whole bunch of quite complicated and hard processes with it, but is entirely worth while. We would like to introduce our work to interested participants in Norway, to present the idea behind the organisation, and maybe find people who would like to engage in the project in Norway. Eike and Nik are two members of Teckids e.V. in Germany. Nik is chairperson and founding member of the organisation, and Eike, now 16 years old, is the tutor who got everything rolling back when he was 11 years old and held his first PyGame workshops at FrOSCon. The two are now lead developers of the Veripeditus project, a new tool to get young people interested in gaming involved in programming using free software tools. NUUG talk from 2017-08-08.