On November 15 for the first time in the Ostrovsky child's library the Drupal-day for schoolboys was held. The youth organisation "Falanster" introduced an open-source system to visitors and trained them to work with it.
The event started at 15:00 and just by the time interested in studying Drupal filled the library media audience. In the small room 8-9 operational machines had had already pre-installed XAMPP for CMS Drupal on them (512MB RAM could considerably slow down installation during the practice). Before the beginning we even had to drive away some schoolboys who were busy with the tanks.
Who were interested in creating their own site came in the amount of about 20. There were fifth and sixth graders from programming hobby group with a teacher, some senior boys and some who are already finished school. They were of different knowledge level: junior boys didn't know anything about content control system and were studying only flash while some senior guys had already tried working with either Drupal or some other CMS. And some guys willingly wanted to ask their own drupal-questions.
The host presented the 3-hour event plan: a short story about "Falanster", theoretical and practical parts. A small presentation of the organisation emphasized current and latest projects.
Then followed the information about open source software with Drupal as an example and drupal-based sites. In main theoretical part the Drupal installation process from the very beginning was understandably shown: deploying of the system, examination of site base units and work on them. The participants got interested in the possibility of making russian localisation for their own site.
By 16:00 we started practise. Everyone who brought their own laptops started installing Drupal on them and those, who didn't - used the media-room's computers. Then, who were ready to practise were divided into groups in order to work more personally. The participants were to develop their own site and start building it.
"For the first it should be noted that such events are of great importance and are significant for progress of a person and society in whole. In regard to this event I can say that it impressed me very much. I'm sure that everyone who visited this meeting got enough information to understand the basic possibilities of Drupal", - Gennadij.
The majority was very active: everyone strived to install all the programs quickly and solve the emerging mistakes on the spot. The Falanster team was literally torn into pieces: everybody needed help or tip, they were learning Drupal rapidly.
By 18:00 we started to sum up this meeting and estimating today's Drupal-work: The teacher of the programming hobby group studied minimal basis of adding pictures to the site and made it in an indefinite amount. The girl-librarian did some work with views and began building a site about foxes, some senior boys and students absorbed in theme-making and not only they disigned their original themes but also began to replacing it's elements with their own ones.
During the Drupal-day we held a competiton: what is the connection between Drupal and Linux? What is cache? What should we do if something goes wrong with our site? What are the most difficult words beginning with "T"? The guys couldn't even put their hands down, they were answering correct, shouting and interrupting each other. In such a way they earned Drupal-notebooks and stickers. Some of them were immediately sticked on their laptops. And in the end of the competition the programming hobby group got the best pize - the book "Drupal 7" from kv.by.
"The Drupal-day passed really wonderful: we studied the theory of the program for the start and then we managed to build our own site with our own hands(of course under the control of the experienced users)! This event gave us a great possibility of starting our progress in this sphere of internet technologies." - Ilya, The BSU faculty of applied mathematics and informatics, first-year student.
"Virus" Drupal is implemented in school generation and now guys will study the open-source system from their youth!
