Teaching Qt/C++

In less than a week, the summer-term at the Vienna University of Technology starts. And as last term, I will be tutor for a course about Software Engineering & Project Managment.

In this course, students should learn how to create a bigger piece of software in teamwork, in all its facets, e.g. project managment, coding, testing, documentation. Normally the software is written in Java, as this is the programming language that they learn from their first term onwards.

Additionally to the Java mainstream variant, there was a variant where the code had to be written in C++. I took this course around 2 years ago and while it was more technical than the Java course, I learned a lot and it also brought me into starting FOSS development. As the person organizing the course stepped back from organisation and the institute was looking for new tutors, two colleagues and me took over the C++ variant of this course and during last summer term, we developed a new project for students to implement and created a reference solution. We changed many aspects of the course, including the used technologies. We changed the GUI Toolkit from GTKMM to Qt and the build system from Autotools to CMake.

Last term our new variant of this course was offered for the first time and after some lectures prepared and held by us (my lectures where about ZeroC Ice and Qt & CMake) three studentteams started to plan & implement the project we gave them. The feedback we received was very positive, especially the use of Qt not only as GUI Toolkit, but for acessing a database or in combination with QCA2 for encryption/decryption made coding a little bit easier for C++ beginners.

So what is the relation to KDE/OpenSource here? In my opinion, it is really bad practice at our university that people aren’t normally forced to learn any other programming languages than Java (depending on the field of study you may also learn C & Haskell). That’s why it was important for me that interested students can choose to code C++ while doing the Software Engineering & Project Managment course. And to give them an introduction into Qt & CMake, so that they would be able (either in their spare time or for university during advanced courses or university projects) to contribute to KDE Applications or other FOSS Qt Software. So I partly see this variant of the course as a FOSS recruitment program 😉

This should also be a call for action: if you think you can mentor an individual student or teams of students and have an idea for an area in your application that they could work on,please contact me.

Blogging,Twittering and Studying

Blogging is something I feel I should do more often. In the last months I started reading more and more really good blogs and somehow I think I would like to share thoughts/ideas via this blog (or on my new Twitter Feed), but I’m to lazy for it.
Maybe this is also because English is not my mother tongue and it would maybe be easier to write in German. Don’t really know, will try to find out. For the moment I will blog in English.

Some words about Twitter (that I could not fit into Messages with a maximum lenght of 140 Characters 😉 ):
Some weeks ago I started reading more and more on Twitter and found it very interesting. I especially like the replies to other Tweets, because you find other interesting Twitter Users and the whole thing becomes more dynamic, more like if people would talk to each other in person.
Then I created my own account,and now I’m not sure about how to use it. Maybe I want to do it more often or not. From time to time doesn’t really make sense.

Studying is something that will also use up some time in the next months, because tomorrow the winter term starts at University, so I will be there more often again 🙂
Tomorrow I’ll attend the Beginners Day for Computer Science Students. Not really because I’m a real Beginner (already had 2 semesters to find out how some things work at the University) but more for the social component. Maybe I’m gonna meet someone I know, maybe some new interesting people, let’s see 🙂

Ohh and I changed this blog back to the standard theme because I just realized that the Fast Lane theme hides all the links … stupid theme, even though it looked so nice.