Re: KDE Program for a FLOSS-oriented CS curriculum

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 4:10 AM, Sandro Andrade <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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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Hi!
I think it's a good initiative, this could go somewhere, if it's done with love.

Personally, I think that narrowing down to Computer Science isn't
fundamental. What is really important is to have a common format so
that we can work on different things in parallel. THE reason why many
schools haven't adopted our software isn't that it isn't good enough
or even that the teachers aren't familiar with it. THE reason is that
they don't know what to do with it, having to come up with what to
teach is enough reason to throw them back, even if they like the
software or the project.

Now my question is: how can we make it easy to come up with this kind
of content?

Aleix

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