Recording: Teaching High School Students Research Computing

Download: Video (WEBM, libre, 323MB),Video (MP4, 962MB) (attribution)

About

Andrea Bruno and Mark Galassi from Los Alamos National Laboratory discussed the Institute for Computing in Research, a pipeline that trains youth to do research and hires high school students to work full time on research internships. Mark co-founded the institute and both mentor students in it. The Institute is rooted in the benefits of software freedom.

This talk was held online on 6 February 2026, as part of this initiative. We have Oxford-based events about free, libre and open-source software, in-person and online for everyone!

Sections

Introduction and Setup
00:00
Start with a social justice angle: Andrea
01:53
Discussion: Our educational experiences
02:40
Teaching High School Students
12:56
Start with a social justice angle: Mark
14:55
The central question: transfer of know-how (references Santa Fe Institute Public Lectures)
15:58
Enter the mentor; Examples of students
17:22
When it really clicks
19:29
Call for mentors; Mark's background and influences
20:00
Three pillars of training
26:16
The 2019, 2020, 2021 interns
28:26
Opening up the talk
30:18
Q&A: Critical Thinking
31:14
Q&A: Funding and Stipends to Students
36:08
Q&A: Software Freedom at the Institute
41:58
Q&A: Student Reactions to FLOSS
46:53

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All original parts of this video are © 2026 Andrea Bruno and Mark Galassi, Institute for Computing in Research, freely licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Click below for licenses of works used within it (which includes fair dealing of things with unspecified licenses).

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Justifications by Oliver Geer

License abbreviations are follawing the SPDX standard

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