Monday 10 June 2013

'Open Library' for my RaspberryPi, Arduino, BeagleBone, Pyhton, CodeClub books and materials on the Chiswick High Road

Yesterday I 'dropped' 10 Python books to a friend's kid house with a 'take a look at these books and pick one that make sense to you' workflow (they are trying to use a RaspeberryPI and learn how to code in Python)

Later that day one of the kids asked me '... can we keep two?..' , which is always a good sign :)

This got me thinking that that some of my books (I have lot of them) deserve to be shared with more kids :)

Maybe I could have them 'somewhere' on the local Chiswick High Road (West London) as a kind of 'Public Geek Library' for kids (and adults).

This could also be a great location to put information about CodeClub and examples of what I'm creating with the kids that I am teaching every Wednesday.

Some draft thoughts:
  • At first, it is probably better if the books stay in that location
  • This makes sense to be on a coffee shop, or a bookstore close-to/with a coffee shop
  • The logic would be that the kids would stop by (with their parents) and read the books for a while (to get some ideas)
  • Maybe if there is a photocopier around, the kids could take some copies home 
  • Ideally the parents would buy the books that are popular with theirs kids
  • Maybe if there is a sponsor, we can just buy the books and let the kids take them home (with a note "please return it when you're done"
  • I wonder if we can put a little tracker in the books that would signal where the book's are (nice project to do with Arduino/Electronics :) )
I already have the books I need to kickstart this, so next I just need to find a location for them

Any ideas?

I also tagged this post with 'Code Cafe' since that is something that I would love to see on every city and community event. This is what I tweeted yesterday: