Kids Day

Kids Day at KubeCon EU Amsterdam

Every year, the biggest cloud computing conference in the world — KubeCon — sets aside one afternoon just for kids.

The kids don't sit in lectures. They build things. They use little computers the size of a deck of cards called Raspberry Pi to rescue characters in a game. They teach a computer to recognize objects through a webcam. It's play — but it's the kind of play that teaches you how the invisible infrastructure of the internet actually works.

Kids Day has been running since 2022, across six conferences on two continents — Detroit, Amsterdam, Chicago, Paris, Salt Lake City, London — and now it returns to Amsterdam.

Cassandra Chin

Cassandra is one of the founders of CNCF Kids Day. She started helping her father instruct workshops when she was ten years old. By fourteen, she was teaching on her own. Now she designs the curriculum, leads the workshops, and has spoken on stages around the world — Devoxx, FOSDEM, DevNexus, JFokus, and KubeCon itself.

She is the author of two books:

• Raising Young Coders: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Programming at Home(Apress, 2025) — a guide for parents who want to introduce their children to programming, with projects from squishy circuits for preschoolers to Raspberry Pi for older kids
• Phippy's AI Friend: Story and Workshop for Kids and Parents— a colorful book that helps families explore AI together using Scratch, the visual programming language

Her philosophy is inspiration over intimidation. She meets kids where they are. The Raspberry Pi workshop is built around a story: Phippy the giraffe and friends are shipwrecked, and the kids have to wire breadboards, write code, and use sensors to rescue them. They're learning hardware and programming, but what they experience is an adventure.

She cites research that matters: women who try computer science in high school are ten times more likely to major in it. Black and Latino students are seven times more likely. Fifth grade — ages 10 to 11 — is the sweet spot for starting. Opportunity is everything.

This year in Amsterdam, Cassandra is running two workshops:

• Phippy and Friends Raspberry Pi Zoo Rescue— hardware, sensors, and containers
• Learning AI with Phippy the Giraffe— building AI models with Scratch and machine learning

Steve Chin

Steve is Cassandra's father and a long-time contributor to the cloud native community. He's one of the people who helped build Kids Day from an idea on a bus ride in Valencia into a program that has now reached hundreds of children across six continents-spanning events.

Father and daughter, building something together across generations. Cassandra learned by being with him at these events — not sent to a class, but included in his world. And then she found her own voice in it. Now she leads, and he supports.

That pattern is the whole point.

We'll Be There

Hippie Hacker and his son Ash are coming to Amsterdam to support Cassandra's work.

They were with Steve and Cassandra at Kids Day in Paris in 2024. When Hippie asked how they could help, the answer was simple: show up, be present, be useful. That's what they're doing again.

Ash has been invited to help teach alongside Cassandra. Hippie is there to support however he can — helping tell the stories, being an extra pair of hands in the room, doing whatever is needed.

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