OT: Teaching software development with Free Software tools

Hi,

Sorry to ask here for this, but I think I can get a lot of very good feedback 
on this topic here. 

I'm currently working part-time as a teacher in the University where I 
studied, and as they know about some of my free software projects, I was asked 
if I wanted to teach another course about software development with Free 
Software tools  the next semester, (of couse I said yes inmediatedly :)). 

For me this is a very important issue, I see this as a great oportunity to 
promote free software development here in Colombia, something that it's near 
to zero here, sadly I think I can count with the fingers in my hands the 
number of free software projects born here. I'm not an expert in software 
development with free software tools, I have beed developing free software 
for less than three years (sporadically), but I think I can share the little 
I have learned with the students that want to get involved (as the course is 
optional, the people that register to it are interested in learning free 
software development). Luckyly, my University is starting to see the 
importance of free software and want to do something to contribute to it.

Here is where I need your help, I have to build the course contents, and I 
want to be sure I'm including all the relevant subjects. And as I'm a KDE 
developer, I think I can give a little emphasis to Qt/KDE programming to the 
course and it's projects :) (without tying it to this technologies) this 
leaves me to another thing, if this course becomes a reallity, it could be a 
good opportunity to have some extra hands (about five or six for around four 
months or more, if they stick around:) ) for KDE/kalyxo 
development :) so also it would be nice to hear about project ideas I could 
assign to my students during the course.

Does anybody know about an existing course catalog I can use? What I have 
thinked of until now:

* The philosophy behind free software and it's development .
* Shell programming
* Perl programming (don't know anything, I'll have to learn)
* Python programming (don't know anything, I'll have to learn)
* Introduction to C++ (now they teach almost everything in java, just a little 
C at the beginning, so they learn little C++)
* POSIX threads ?(don't know anything, I'll have to learn)
* Free software tools:
- The GNU C/C++ compiler, gcc
- The GNU debuger, gdb
- Compilation of UNIX applications (./configure;make;make install; etc) 
- The autotools (autconf,automake,etc)
- Software managment with CVS
- Development toolkits (Qt. GTK+,wxWindows, etc)
- Emphasis in Qt libs
- KDevelop and QtDesigner
- KDE libraries and their technologies

The course should have around 64 hours during 16 weeks, four hours weekly with 
at least two of those four hours being of actual development, plus 64 more 
hours of stimated individual student work. I hope this is enought time to 
work on all of these subjects.

I hope you can give me useful suggestions about how to improve the course !


Cheers and thanks in advance!
-- 
Juan Luis Baptiste
http://www.merlinux.org
http://knetworkconf.sf.net