Presentation at Sundsgymnasiet school

I was invited by Mats, a teacher at the Sundsgymnasiet school in Vellinge, to give a talk to his students, all three years of the Technical Programme. Sundsgymnasiet is an upper secondary school, probably what in the US would be called senior highschool, with students normally starting in the year they turn 16 and finishing at 19.

I didn't know what to expect, really. Mats told me I could talk about whatever I wanted, so of course I talked about the Tillitis Tkey, which also meant I could do it on company time.

I thought about how I would explain the TKey to these teenagers but in the end decided that I would try to talk to the 17-year-old version of myself. I was sure he would be somewhere in the audience. Basically I didn't plan to hold back on the technical details and instead rely on the audience asking questions if they didn't understand or needed more explanations.

I'm not sure this was the best idea.

Vellinge is a bit outside Malmö, so I had to go by bus for about half an hour. Thankfully the lecture would be in the afternoon, so I didn't have to go by bus early in the morning. Not looking back with fond memories of early morning bus commutes!

Mats was waiting for me at the entrance to one of the buildings and we had time for a quick tour and some coffee before the lecture. I got to see their computer rooms and it was interesting to compare with my own school in the late 1980s. These days the students all have their own laptops so I didn't even see any desktop computers, just a bunch of monitors. They didn't have any external keyboards, which I found a little strange. I kept wondering what I would have done if I was a student, not least because of…

It seemed the school had made some deal with Microsoft. The students were running Windows on their laptops and used Office365. There were also a Surface Hub in all the classrooms!

Malmö schools, in comparison, is very much on the Chromebook and Google Workspace/Classroom track, at least for younger students.

Not sure what is the worst option here. I keep wondering what all the protohackers do. Yes, there's an SSH client by default on ChromeOS. Are they even allowed to use it? What about on the Windows laptops? Is the SSH option enabled? What about WSL? Are they allowed to turn these options on? Are there any *nix servers somewhere the schools provide access to? I wonder if I can ask anything like this on an open house type event?

Back to Sundsgymnasiet… In the computer room I hooked up my Thinkpad to a Surface Hub and did some experiments. Could I mirror the screen and do my presentation in Emacs, like I had intended, even in this environment? It seemed I could! I had prepared and sent a PDF to Mats and was ready to use his computer just in case, but I'm much more comfortable in Emacs with org-present.

Time for the lecture! About 60-70 students, a couple of teachers, and three peope from IBM. The IBMers would also give a talk. The IBMers started. They spoke about their idea of how to do a project and what kind of studies lead them to where they are today. A completely different level compared to what I was going to talk about! I started to get really nervous and broke out in a cold sweat.

Then it was my turn! When I initially connected my Thinkpad and moved a few windows over to the other screen my green-on-black terminals were visible for a moment. I heard gasps and someone commented quite loud "He's a hacker!". I just said "You bet!" and started the presentation with Emacs which, I guess, just proved the point.

The talk was quite technical. I think a lot of it went over their heads but I saw some interested faces and got some questions at the end. I call that at least some success.

I wanted to get across that a very small team of dedicated individuals using just open source tools can build a small computer with interesting features. I also wanted to to show that they can access everything and start learning and hacking on the thing themselves, right now, even if they can't afford buying a TKey since we have a decent emulator and all source and the tools are freely available.

I'm not sure I succeeded in explaining all this.