Re: OT: Teaching software development with Free Software tools

On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 00:13:21 -0500, Juan Luis Baptiste
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 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 :)).

Your students are lucky :)

> 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
You can add some user concern.
+ Common Unix spec, the right, the FHS.
+ what is a distribution ?
> * Perl programming (don't know anything, I'll have to learn)
I advise you to buy the o'reilly introduction book. Documentation on
net consider perl just like another language with it own syntaxe, or
are advanced documentation for perl monk.
> * 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)
I think you can skip this or talk about on the last lessons
> * 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
Talk a little about subversion,  it's a better software managment than
CVS in my opinion
> - Development toolkits (Qt. GTK+,wxWindows, etc)
Little about Tk ? :) (I'am kidding)
> - 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!

Good luck
-- 
Sylvain "Skarsnik" Colinet

Victory was near but the power of the ring couldn't be undone