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Doing a workshop for kids on making music using FLOSS

Posted: Wed Oct 16, 2013 10:51 am
by zth
Hey everyone!

I will be doing a workshop for kids on making music using FLOSS software in early november. I'm going to be documenting my planning and preparing of this, and I just put the first blogpost about it up at my site: http://www.zthmusic.com/fscons13-linux-audio-part-1/

I would love it if you read through it and gave me your ideas/feedback for how I could improve/do this better. In the first blogpost, I've outlined the current plan and what the goals of the workshop is. Please leave a comment on the blog if there's any feedback you can think of that would benefit me at all. I'm sure lots of you have experience with similar things, and have tons of valuable tips for me :).

Thanks!

Re: Doing a workshop for kids on making music using FLOSS

Posted: Wed Oct 16, 2013 1:59 pm
by tnovelli
Ok, I left a comment... basically "try LMMS" :)

One question: how are you planning to make the KXStudio liveUSB sticks cloneable?
Remastersys comes to mind but it's pretty clunky. Also, say one of these kids makes a bunch of music and then the USB stick dies. We ought to make it as painless as possible for them - or anyone else - to download and install a fresh copy. I bet we could make liveUSB usage simpler... say, one FAT32 partition with all the Linux stuff buried under /syslinux and flagged read-only... and during bootup, expand the partition to include any unused space on the USB stick. They could save their work there, where it's easily accessible from any computer. I think it's also possible (using loopfs?) to mount a disk image file as a read-write overlay on / so they can install packages and such. I can't see that being ready and tested in 3 weeks unless it already exists, but it's a nice goal, eh?

Re: Doing a workshop for kids on making music using FLOSS

Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2013 10:29 am
by zth
Thanks for the comment tnovelli!

I spoke to falkTX and the impression I got was that it won't be an issue to modify and then clone the USB's. But I'll have to cross that bridge when I get to it. Currently, I've started looking at what to include etc. So that's where my focus is right now. Will hopefully do another post tomorrow on this!

Cheers,
zth

Re: Doing a workshop for kids on making music using FLOSS

Posted: Sun Oct 20, 2013 8:56 pm
by zth
Second post out, some more planning in this one :).

http://www.zthmusic.com/fscons13-linux-audio-part-2/

Re: Doing a workshop for kids on making music using FLOSS

Posted: Wed Nov 27, 2013 8:50 am
by zth
Hey guys!

I just wanted to say that this project is finished and wrapped. If you're interested in how it all went, you can check out my roundup post at: http://www.zthmusic.com/fscons13-linux-audio-part-4/

Thanks to everyone who's given me feedback and helped me!

Re: Doing a workshop for kids on making music using FLOSS

Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2013 6:34 pm
by Shadow_7
That sounds like a neat project. Just thinking to myself, that maybe it could be like a $60 per participant workshop. That does all that on a raspberry pi and at the end of it, they get to keep the pi. There's more spec-y devices out now than pi. But I'd jump on something like that just because I get the hardware. As long as it's within 100 miles of me and other for a cause motivations. Like my dad used to do in days of old, time share events for the free portable TV or the inflateable raft. How times have changed.