Mozilla, Firefox, “fixing computers” & a room full of kindergartners

My son has a vague concept of what I do at work. He knows I work at “Firefox”, knows the dino and knows I “fix computers”.

He knows that if he wants to get online he has to double-click on the Firefox icon and then on the Kidzui icon:

kidzui-toolbarHe asked me if I could come to his school and show people how I “fix computers”.

I started off by asking if anyone recognized the logo on the back of my shirt.  Even to a room full of 5 year olds, the Firefox logo was instantly recognizable – there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know what it was.  I talked briefly about what Mozilla did (“we make a web browser”) and that I help fix computers when they break.

I thought about showing them Mitchell’s Mozilla Tree but probably couldn’t have done as well as Mitchell could have!

Then I pulled out my laptop and showed them Firefox (Minefield really).  I was in the middle of showing them Firefox and how what my son does when he wants to get on the Internet… and Minefield crashed.  Which was a great segue into “lets go look at these computers I brought and how I fix them!”

I brought three old Celeron “servers” (you can hardly call a Celeron a server) with lids off and we spent the next 20 minutes taking apart the machines.  We took out the computer’s brain and the fan to keep it cool (they didn’t believe me that you could cook food on the CPU when the computer was “thinking hard”).  We took out the two memory sticks and the hard drive and the IDE cable.

These are things most parents in their right mind wouldn’t do with their home computer and these kids really enjoyed physically touching these parts and asking questions.

Mary Colvig helped me gather up a bunch of Firefox bags and my two kids and I had stuffed stickers into each one. Kids went crazy over the Foxkeh stickers and there was a collective “awwww!” when I showed them the “don’t hurt the web” stickers!

Anyways, good times. I enjoyed talking about Mozilla in a very different setting than I’m used to.

I’m going to go work on my new role in community outreach now…

10 thoughts on “Mozilla, Firefox, “fixing computers” & a room full of kindergartners”

  3. Really cool! I think we should all be trying harder to get our kids excited about technology right from the get-go… After all, they are our next gen who’ll surely do even more amazing things with the Web than we are! 😉

  4. Baka_toroi says:

    Makes me think about the country in which I want to raise my kids (when I have them, that is).

    My congratulations: this is the kind of education the world needs.

  8. These are things most parents in their right mind wouldn’t do with their home computer and these kids really enjoyed physically touching these parts and asking questions.

  9. KidZui is a child-safe internet front end that calls upon an enormous whitelist of websites, pictures, videos, and games that have all been reviewed by a group of volunteers composed of parents and educators.

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