LaTeX for high school students? And writing LaTeX online?

[Marei Peischl]

On 26.10.22 05:28, Christopher W. Ryan via texhax wrote:
> I've always thought it might be useful for students to learn something
> of LaTeX in high school and arrive at college  able, to some extent, to
> write papers and beamer slides in it. In contrast to some of them
> learning it *in* college. No need to belabor the virtues of writing in
> LaTeX here, obviously. So why not introduce interested or curious high
> school students to it, especially (but not only) those who have some
> inkling to pursue scientific/mathematical/technical fields?
>
> I have this crazy idea to offer introductory LaTeX workshops to high
> schools that are interested.  If nothing else, it might help keep me
> busy after retirement.
I'd not call that a crazy idea.
>
> As far as I know, at least in my area of the US, this is not currently
> being done. Does anyone have any experience doing this? Is it a fool's
> errand?

I did a bunch of workshops or courses with highshool students in 
Germany. Those groups were either aged 12–14 or 15+. With the younger 
ones I actually started doing some beamer presentations and made them 
present those within the group afterwards. Which turned out to work 
better than simple text documents.

The workshops have been either organized by the schools or by local 
hackerspaces and none was forced to do.

It worked quite well, but the learnings have been much better when the 
students really got encouraged to use it within some school projects 
afterwards. So I also started to involve other teachers in this. Which 
is a bit more complicated since most stick to MS Office. But wherever it 
was possible the teachers also started to be more interested in LaTeX 
themselves.

Additionally I started to add some small git introduction. (Just 
pull/commit/push) This was also catching some teachers who got used to 
filenames like “x-finally_final.docx” ;-)

> And are there websites where one can compose a complete LaTeX source
> document and compile it, obtaining pdf output?  Many under-resources
> schools in the US, where students are unlikely to have their own
> computers at home, provide locked-down Chromebooks to all their
> students. They are unable to install any software on them.

We either installed a TeX Live locally on the students' laptops, on the 
school's computers or created a local installation of the Overleaf 
Community Edition. Both worked quite well. I usually prefer a local 
installation to keep the students independent and they can also use it 
afterwards outside school.

The use of the community edition was mostly due to privacy concerns. So 
we needed to host it ourselves.

We also had the idea of making the students edit within a git server web 
IDE, this didn't work that well. They got mostly confused by the waiting 
time for the CI pipeline in the background. But was worth a try.

I hope this helps and would really love to see more highschool students 
workshops for LaTeX :)

Best,

Marei


>
> Appreciate any insights, experiences, opinions, or advice.
>
> --Chris Ryan