Common Connections
Creating the Classroom
Traditional educational approaches aren’t enough to shape the makers and thinkers of tomorrow. For Charlie Reisinger and Melanie Shimano’s students, open source shows the real-world potential of classroom ideas. See why in this conversation.
Melanie is an engineer, data scientist, and open source enthusiast who has helped bring food and agriculture to life for students in Baltimore. Cultivating Change shows how her Food Computer Program empowered high school students at Green Street Academy to use open source tools to grow their own vegetables.
Charlie is a champion of open source in education. He launched Pennsylvania’s largest classroom desktop Linux® program and has written extensively about how schools can use open source to empower students. In Penn Manor: The Power of Open in Education, we spotlighted the student-powered IT help desk Charlie created at his school.
