Re: Teaching GNOME to students

["Kevin Kubasik" <kevin kubasik net>]

On Nov 15, 2007 2:12 AM, Emmanuel Fleury <fleury labri fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> >
> > Free Software is full of good code indeed.  Some of projects put
> > creating good code in very high priority, and I'm honored to be
> > co-maintaining one such module in the GNOME environment.   It's the
> > cairo graphics library and I highly recommend using cairo as a real-life
> > example when you are covering GNOME.
> >
> >   http://cairographics.org/
>
> Indeed, this is a relevant module to be part of our course.
>
> Actually, we're running into a small problem with this course right now.
> Because this course doesn't scale... more students we get more work we
> have. Mainly, we spend time on selecting interesting bugs, interesting
> features to implement.
Why not make this part of the student assignment? I know that at the
University Of Maryland (in the US) there is a similar course, where
the first paper is students comparison of several open projects and
what they might contribute to each, I don't know the exact
organization of the class, this might be too much time, but is a
possibility =/.

>
> My guess is that we should send a mail on the gnome-desktop-devel
> mailing-list calling for some 'interesting' bugs (and later on,
> features) to present to students as projects.
>
> But, do you think it would be too much work for the GNOME community or
> would it be ok ? My hope is that each maintainer will spend less time
> browsing his buglist looking for interesting bugs than us having to
> figure out everything... So comes the call-for-bugs and
> call-for-features on the gnome-desktop-devel.
>
> What do you think ?
>
Personally, I think that the Gnome community would be willing to put
the time into listing interesting bugs etc. if we are somewhat
confident they will be addressed. I think the Google SoC is a great
example of how willing the community is to generate project ideas if
we are somewhat sure they will get attention. No doubt plenty of bugs
we list will not 'make the cut' however, if we are
confident/experience shows that students are generating good fixes, I
think the community would pounce on an opportunity to offload some
bugs!

Just my $0.02!

-Kevin Kubasik
> > Totally irrelevant but can't help thinking about The Tao of Programming:
> >
> >   http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html
>
> Maybe irrelevant, but funny and sometimes inspiring. ;)
>
> Regards
> --
> Emmanuel Fleury
>
> It's entirely untested, but it looks good and compiles. Ship it!
>   -- Linus Torvalds
>
> _______________________________________________
> academia-list mailing list
> academia-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/academia-list
>



-- 
Cheers,
Kevin Kubasik
http://kubasik.net/blog