Re: Teaching GNOME to students

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 10:12 +0100, Emmanuel Fleury wrote:
[...]
> 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.

Right.  These kind of courses are typically run as project courses that
need time-consuming 1-to-1 interaction.


> 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.

Or alternatively, ask for volunteer mentors that are willing to define
project (bug / ...) for one student and mentor them for the period of
the project.  I'm sure we have people interested in doing this.  See our
Summer of Code experience for example.


> 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.

I'm sure it would be Ok.


> What do you think ?

Sometime ago we (the GNOME Summer of Code admins) discussed the
possibility of maintaining a year-round list of GNOME tasks instead of
starting one every year for the SoC.  We then found that this can be
useful in other contexts/contests too.  Your case just adds evidence.
What we need is a pool of ideas that the community as a whole maintains,
and each idea has meta information including difficulty, required time
and expertise, and an owner.

Main problem with such a list of course is that it falls outdated pretty
quickly.  So we need to think about how that can be kept alive.


> > 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. ;)

Yes, inspiring.

> Regards



-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
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