I've talked to some of you on IRC, and I know there's some opposition to this idea... but I'd really like to have some more testing and input from younger folks...

Here's the deal: whatever your age please go to promagia.org, browse around, and let me know what you think. You can use email, message me on IRC, or leave comments here.

We'll give out full site privileges (ssh, web, mysql, etc) to a few YPN members who will be willing to be candid ... hopefully in a positive way, to make Promagia truly useful to younger folks.

I know that there is some overlap between YPN and what Promagia is trying to do. I think there's enough difference that we don't need to be rivals. I don't think there's any doubt that YPN is a success; Promagia is another story, and the beta testers will help us figure that out.

sounds great to me, but if it's really targetted at students and young people for learning purposes, you've chosen a hard way to make money. I think that many young people, especially students, don't have a lot of money, and try to save where they can.
In this case, their easy alternative would be to install linux and experiment around with the freely available daemons and server programms, which are free of charge.
The site looks cool, and also quite infromative.
But still, if you're really targetting students and young people, it might be better to make it freely available, since young people have very limited amounts of money (in most cases).
Good luck with your site
[addsig]

Well, the idea isn't to make money so much as to make sure there is enough money to pay for a good solid host and Internet connection, and to allow for the possibility that we won't have enough volunteers to handle things, and we may need to pay a helper or two.

If you know of a foundation that wants to support it, I'd be happy to offer the service for free.

Acknowledging that older students might be able to make their own arrangements: this is really for younger students, particularly those whose parents don't want them hunting around on the 'net on their own, or who could benefit from a bit of coaching. For this group, it is likely that the parents would be coming up with the fee, and the theory I'm testing is that the service provides good value for the cost. If students spend a few months at our site, then strike out on their own, that's okay, though I'd prefer it if they decided that the Academy is so much fun and offers so many features for such a ridiculously small price (by US or European standards) that they'd want to continue.

Part of it is making the site look attractive to younger persons, and part is to make it look worthwhile to their parents ... a balancing act at the best of times.

But that's part of what I'm hoping to test. I do appreciate your kind words.

Quote:
On 2002-11-08 21:11, KaGez wrote:
sounds great to me, but if it's really targetted at students and young people for learning purposes, you've chosen a hard way to make money.

oh, ok, you just want to get the money you'll need to pay for that project...
Btw, what would you need helpers for? And, how do you want to "teach" these young people in the end? These 2 things'd be the 2 which interest me most right now. I'd be happy if you could give me some informations (doesn't need to go into detail ) about this
[addsig]

I'm extrapolating from work I've done with others in this age group ... but I'm primarily thinking of a "learn by doing" approach, where the learners come up with a project or goal and dive in. Much of the time they'll just need a few questions answered, or pointing in the right direction, and they're off on their own. So we'll provide that, plus resources. For example, someone may have a project in mind, and we might suggest python as an approach (just hypothetically). We've got an introductory tutorial in python about ready, so we can point them in that direction, they can work through that and then apply it.

That's something helpers can provide. Right now we're putting together some introductory materials -- files/links, open source (and possibly commercial) materials that we've found useful, articles on the web or elsewhere with useful information, tutorials to work through specific concepts (or pointers to existing tutorials elsewhere).

I'm assuming that the community can answer a lot of the questions itself, but that some will be more easily (or accurately) answered by someone who has more experience. One of our helpers is 13, with very extensive experience in some things. He's very good.

I imagine much of our effort will be spent responding to specific requests, on the theory that something a learner asks about represents a learning opportunity. We'll also offer a suggestion here and there.

Plus there's a certain amount of "housekeeping" involved in setting up accounts, troubleshooting, monitoring for problems, especially if we have a lot of relatively inexperienced users.

Quote:On 2002-11-09 11:18, KaGez wrote:
oh, ok, you just want to get the money you'll need to pay for that project...
Btw, what would you need helpers for? And, how do you want to "teach" these young people in the end? These 2 things'd be the 2 which interest me most right now. I'd be happy if you could give me some informations (doesn't need to go into detail ) about this

I feel you are after money, and you have a very good idea, nice marketin ploy behind you, push this right, you will have some tidy profits, but python!!! wtf
well, I reckon VB is best language to teach someone from scratch, then after they have right ideas, web based is next best thing, as everyone wants to be able to make a web page.

Hope all goes well.
(-;

Hey, that's almost the route I took. [addsig]