Promoting Open Source in Schools

[Marc Lijour]

On Monday 19 December 2005 00:10, Sacha Chua wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the ideas!
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