Ada & Zangemann in French, Support by Minister of Education and Fan Art

As you might have seen, the French version "Ada & Zangemann - Un conte sur les logiciels, le skateboard et la glace à la framboise" is now available from C & F éditions. On their website, you can also get access to the e-book, which thanks to the "French Department of Digital for Education" is available free of charge. Many things happened around the French version.

On 4 December 2023, the French Minister of Education, Gabriel Attal, presented the book "Ada & #Zangemann" to the APFA parliamentarians meeting in the old Bonn parliament. Afterwards he gifted the book to Anke Rehlinger, Minister President of the Saarland (Germany). Below you see the French video (thanks Erik da Silva and Dario Presutti with several subtitles).

The book was covered in a radio interview by "Radio France", in several articles, including Le Monde, ZDnet, or blogs, as well as TV coverage at Sqool TV with Alexis Kauffmann, from the French Ministry of Education and the person who started with the idea of the French translation.

I was honoured that David Revoy painted this great version of Ada, published under Creative Commons by share alike as well (high resolution and source files also available).

David is doing really great illustration; with his comic Pepper & Carrot as well as with other great work for example for the French organisation Framasoft to promote software freedom. He also publishes his work under the Creative Commons by share alike license.

Furthermore, if you are interested how to create artwork with Free Software, with tools like Krita, also check out his website as he is publishing a lot of tutorials and tools. Below you see his recording of the progress of the Ada illustration which he published on the fediverse.

Rayan (Alès), Matteo (Besançon), Rozenn (Guingamp), Louna (Paris)... more than a hundred students, aged 13 to 19, from four different schools in France, translated this book from German into French over the course of the 2022-2023 school year, sharing the work and coordinating it using online tools.

On 7 December, Sandra Brandstätter, the illustrator, and I were invited to participate in an online meeting organised by the French Ministry of Education, with several of the pupils attending, who translated the book. It was amazing to hear that they have spent several weeks on the project; including writing their own story when they have just seen the illustrations of the book, discussing the characters Ada and Zangemann, the connection of the story to real world development, and of course the translation itself. It was great to have the chance to be there with them and thank some of them personally.

I would like to thank all the people who help to promote the book. Especially, thank you to Alexis Kauffmann from the French Ministry of Education and founder of Framasoft for initialising this project, C & F éditions for publishing it, ADEAF (Association pour le développement de l'enseignement de l'allemand en France) for coordinating the project, the teachers for spending so much time and energy into the project, and most importantly all the pupils who did such a great work!