What Should Go Into A 75-Minute BSD Primer?

phraud16 asks: "I'm a 16-year-old student, and have been asked to bring in my BSD box, hook it up to the school network and teach my computer class about FreeBSD for the full 75 minutes. Every student is going to have his or her own login, and telnet into my box. I wanted to ask you Slashdot readers, what is the best way to teach BSD? Should I explain the history, then move on to commands? Should I leave out the history and go right to commands? Explain what servers are first? Ask the Class what an OS is? I could talk endlessly about FreeBSD and how good it is, but i'm stumped on where to begin teaching, and what areas of BSD the class should look at. I was thinking of just teaching stuff like: cp, mv, pico, mail, rm, df, and a few other commands? I don't want to bore them to death, and I don't want to only teach for 15 minutes of 75."

Comments

What is your audience

[biglig2]

How much computing knowlege do they have?
I think at least you should talk a little about what an OS is, then explain what UNIX is and what Open Source is about.

See older article

[autocracy]

Suggestions For Starting A Linux Education Course? - You'll find some suggestions on a course, including mine. Just cut out the X section and the LFS machine. Basically, you're going to teach them the history of BSD and its principles (10 minutes), strengths, places of use, etc. (10 minutes), and how to use it (55 minutes). Teach them basics first (opening, editing, moving files, changing directories). Then, move up a little bit to permissions, ownership, etc. (chmod, chown). Go on to e-mail, etc. You'll have a lesson fast!

Just remember, the rule is to start with the most absolute basic commands that you use the most, then move up...

The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...

A few questions

[Zachary Kessin]

How technical are the students in your class. If they know Linux or Solaris you will want to talk about how BSD is different from Linux, if they only know Windows you will want to talk about very different things.

You need to tailor what you say to your audience. I would write an outline up and go over it in advance with your teacher, he or she can give you a good sense of if what you are saying is about at the correct level. A teacher will also be able to help you figure out how much material you need for a 75 min talk (A lot really) and probably be a very big help.

Good luck with this, learning to get up infront of people and talk about stuff is a wonderful skill to have. When you are done post an outline and let us know how it went. You might want to go over it after the fact with your teacher to see what you can learn after the fact about presenting material, it won't be the last time you do it.