Get Involved

Read It to Others

One way to spark children's interest in coding is to read the book to them: in your family, or to your friends' or co-workers' families. It is very motivating and fulfilling to discuss the topic with children and hear about their ideas on what they want to accomplish with technology. You can, for example, simply download the presentation PDF slides and use the text with markers for when to turn the slides.

If you feel comfortable, you can also organise a larger book reading. You can offer that to schools, youth clubs, or libraries. They often look for people to read books and it is a good way to talk with children about their thoughts on technology and about software freedom. On the resources page, you can find additional material of the book.

A teacher standing in a classroom holding the book, with all the pupils holding the book in front of their heads. — Ada and Zangemann reading in a French school

If you organise a reading, we recommend that it takes place in a location with few distractions. Readings in "open spaces" have turned out to be more challenging for the reader, and especially younger children in particular are much more easily distracted by noise or movement in another area of the room. For smaller readings, try to create a cosy environment with as little space as possible between you and the audience. For example, making the audience sit on the floor on pillows, with the reader in front of them. You can find everything you need to organise a reading in our documentation.

two people with a book — Event with reading of the book in Ukrainian

The author, Matthias Kirschner, has already given several readings of the book: At events for children and adults (from 6 to 106 years), in school classes, libraries, cinemas, and on other occasions. If you are interested in a reading by the author or in other available languages by the FSFE volunteers, please contact us at contact@fsfe.org.

Many children and addults in the conference SFSCON 2023 during a book reading. — Italian reading by Marta Andreoli and Dario Presutti at SFSCON 2023

Sharepic with a portrait of a person and the quote Curiosity and the Freedom to tinker naturally explains Free Software in this light hearted children’s story. Why not have our ice cream machines that make every flavor and shape? Excellent work! — Sharepic by Brewster Kahle, Founder Internet Archive (Europe)

A picture says more than a thousand words! You can use the sharepic generator to show your love for the book and post your review by generating a picture that you can share on social media channels or add to your blog.

Gift the Book to Others

A girl reading a book labeled as remix version — Mila reading a remix version of Ada & Zangemann © CC-BY 4.0 Romain Debailleul

Gifting the book to friends and family or co-workers will help to spark children's interest in coding. You can buy a copy online or at your favourite bookstore. After buying it helps a lot if you leave a review or feedback for the store, so they can recommend it to others as well.

If you would like to buy a larger number of discounted books, e.g. to gift to employees, partners, or for events, please contact us at contact@fsfe.org.

Suggest It to Libraries / Schools

You can recommend the book to your public library or you can even donate a copy if a library does not have the budget to buy it but you can afford to. The same applies to youth clubs, schools, or hackerspaces. Your copy will enable children to read it who might not have the financial means to buy it themselves.

Many children in a classroom in Boston (USA) during a book reading with the author. — Author reading of Ada & Zangemann in Boston, USA

Share as Example Files

All the material around the book and the movie is available under Creative Commons CC By Share Alike. This enables you to include the e-book or the movie on computers at schools, universities, or as example files for GNU/Linux distributions. This is a great way to spread the story further. If you do, please let us know.

Organise a Screening

A movie screen showing the film about Ada and Zangemann. On either side of the screen are several rows of red seats with children sitting in them, seen from behind. — Screening of the movie at its German premiere in Essen, 2024

If reading the book aloud is not your thing, you could also organise a movie screening. Either in a private setting, or with the DCP movie files even renting a cinema and inviting families, your employees with children, or school classes to attend. For the German premiere, we rented the largest cinema in Germany and watched the movie with over 800 children. This is perfect to spark children's interest in technology.

Translate

The FSFE would like as many people as possible to learn about the book and be able to read it in their mother tongue. If you would like to do a community translation you can directly start on our Weblate instance, please let the FSFE's translation team know about it and have a look at the translation guidelines.

If you have any contacts with publishers, which are interested to publish the book in another language, or if you are interested in ordering a larger number of books if the book would be available in a certain language, then please contact us at contact@fsfe.org.

Adapt

In the spirit of the license, you can automatically generate book variants based on templates and the translated text yourself. Do you want to change the names in the book to your children's names? Do you dislike some parts of the story and want to make changes? This practical guide explains how to build the various output formats. It is the same tooling that automatically builds different formats of the book from the translations on Weblate such as the screen-readable PDFs.

Help with Automation

The impact of the story is increased when the story is available in more languages and more formats. Therefore, the automation should make it easy to add new translations and formats. It should also be easy to generate and finetune output files, regardless of technical skill or operating system. Free culture should be favoured when selecting programs and content such as fonts. If you would like to help improve the tool chain for the story, you can check out the relevant documentation.