KDE Program for a FLOSS-oriented CS curriculum

Hi there,

I've been thinking about the process by which newcomers start doing
their contributions in KDE. In spite of some minor exceptions, I guess
undergraduate students are still the majority of such potential
contributors. However, different universities around the world vary
from zero to very intense incentives not only to the adoption but also
to focus their academic activities towards FLOSS applications.

Certainly many possible causes for such zero adoption of FLOSS in
universities are out of our immediate control, but I think we have
chances for addressing another ones. What I've seen, at least in
Brazil, is that most CS professors are either not interested in FLOSS
or perhaps interested but completely unaware about how things work and
how they would correlate FLOSS with the subjects taught in their
courses.

Cutting right to the chase, I was wondering if the availability of a
high quality and comprehensive "KDE Program for a FLOSS-oriented CS
curriculum" would help in any way the number of CS students doing
their work using KDE software. In practical terms, we initially would
have to agree on a common CS curricula (hopefully that is expected to
be easily identified) and then document, for each curriculum
component, the KDE technologies that would be either inspiring sources
for analysis or potential cases to apply, as contributions, concepts
related to that curriculum component.

Some examples:

- For a "Data Structure" and "Graph Theory" courses: we  would
document possible contributions in Rocs or the main implementation
aspects of Qt container classes.
- For a "Design Patterns" and "Software Architecture" courses: we
would describe how patterns have been used across KDE software and the
tactics adopted in outstanding architectures of applications like
KDevelop, Qt Creator, Plasma, KF5, and many others.
- For a "Software Quality" and "Project Management" courses: we would
explain the quality assurance process adopted in Qt and KDE
communities, along with the tools, standards, and procedures that
support the process.
- For a "Computer Graphics and Image Processing" course: we would
point out contributions possibilities in kdenlive, krita, and so on.
- For a "Compilers and Programming Paradigms" course: we could explore
the grantlee parser automata and/or the QML interpreter.

The ultimate goal would be having a detailed set of guidelines about
how to adopt KDE as a central case study in CS courses. Obviously,
that would require some time investment and the help of those of you
who knows a lot about KDE solutions.

By now, I would like to hear from you about two initial questions:

1) Do you experience this same scenario in your countries/universities
and consider this problem 'pervasive' enough to demand a global
endeavour from our community ?

2) Do you think such a 'KDE Program' is worth and would help in
fostering the adoption of KDE in universities and in alleviating some
initial contribution barriers ?

Cheers,
--
Sandro

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