Promoting Open Source in Schools

[Sacha Chua]

Marc Lijour <marc-bbkyySd1vPWsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org> writes:

> Interestingly, we are discussing how to promote CS courses in
> high-school in my CS course at OISE (UofT). One idea which popped up
> in my head thanks to the discussions there, is to create a product
> within the course. This product needs obviously to be based on OSS.

Exposing students to open source development is an excellent way to
get them to work on things with real value. I remember being so
frustrated by the fact that all of the school projects I worked on
each term really came to no use. =) Open source was one of the things
that really deepened my appreciation for computer science.

We experimented with some of the ideas in open source in the
university-level freshman computing course I taught back in the
Philippines. During the first semester, students worked on a
single-computer multi-player game. During the second term, we swapped
the projects around and had the students improve the design and add
networking/multithreading. Among other things, the students gained a
very good appreciation of the benefits of coding conventions. ;) They
also learned a lot from cool things other people did. Exposing
students to other people's code is an excellent idea, and something
that should be done more often.

Also, I remember being inspired by the fact that there was an
operating systems course out there that had students experimenting
with Linux on the iPaq. I figured that if they could do it, so could
I. That was a lot of fun, and it led to my first public commit rights.
=)

I'm a big fan of open source in computing education, and I think
students definitely need to get exposed to bigger projects than the
exercises we have them do in class.

-- 
Sacha Chua <sacha-ctE++fEYmiYdc6zLPptBHg at public.gmane.org> - open source, free software geekette
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, personal information management, public speaking
sachac on irc.freenode.net#emacs . YM: sachachua83
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