Qt for teaching

sfilippidis

Well, this semester I tought a course on "Human-Computer Interaction" at the department of Informatics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. C++/Qt was my choise for the "practical" part of the course.

I have been using C++/Qt for more than a year and I am very excited with it's evolvement!

Within the course, I focused on the GUI part of the framework. Students have a good background on C++ (from a previous semester course on C++ programming). Since the educational material you develop know were not ready, I mainly used other resources such as the official Qt-book, Qt's tutorials, Qt's demos etc.

I have many ideas about how to use Qt in education, and I will be happy to participate in the QtDevNet "education-branch" of the community! ;)

hlinaae

Cool - thanks! Looking forward to further input and discussions. :)

kamalakshantv

I am currently reading the course materials and have found some typo's here and there. May be someone can review it and fix it.

sfilippidis

[quote author="QtK" date="1276863107"]I am currently reading the course materials and have found some typo's here and there. May be someone can review it and fix it. [/quote]

I suppose you could make a list of the typo's and send them to Hanne ;)

kamalakshantv

[quote author="Stavros Filippidis" date="1276863204"][quote author="QtK" date="1276863107"]I am currently reading the course materials and have found some typo's here and there. May be someone can review it and fix it. [/quote]

I suppose you could make a list of the typo's and send them to Hanne ;)[/quote]

Ya sure I am doing that, but it might take some time for me to list all of that.

gtpt

Hi,
I was reading this thread and "andreiamenta" caught my attention.
Two years ago, i started teaching C++/Qt in this School in Portugal: "Your text to link here...(ESDAS)":http://www.es-afonsosanches.pt

How did i find Qt?
I was looking for:

open source

multi platform

a project that has a quality and is adequate for teaching

Naturally i found Qt and started my research.
Very quickly i realized that C++ and Qt, along with some other important tools, were a very good solution for teaching OOP and creating applications with nice GUI.
This combination could be used from very simple, to complex programming, requiring only an adjustment to the students level and the goals defined for each subject int the curriculum.

The IDE was the only obstacle, but Qt Creator emerged and and is improving day after day.

This story could have an happy end like -” ... and they lived happily ever after.”, but then found the main obstacle.

I am not referring to the students, because they adapt easily to new situations. Teacher were, and still are, the problem.

There seems to be some kind of addiction to things like: Windows, Visual Basic, Visual Studio, and other visual blá, blá, blá.

And worse! People use this not because it's better. Not because it is more adequate for the task. Not because its a solution with a future.
They use it because is was always like this, and changing is not the easy path.

I'm not saying that Qt is here to save the World, or that everyone should use it.

I simply consider it a very good tool for teaching.

Congratulations for all the work started and yet to come.

“Long live Qt”

sfilippidis

[quote author="Hanne" date="1275403244"]...

We already have some teaching material available, and are in the process of developing more.
Have a look at "the Qt in Education pages":http://qt.nokia.com/services-partners/qt-in-education, and let us know what you think.

...[/quote]

I see that you have added "slide content draft in odp-format" for L5-L6-...-L10 at

"http://qt.nokia.com/services-partners/qt-in-education/qt-in-education-course-material(http://qt.nokia.com/services-partners/qt-in-education/qt-in-education-course-material)":http://qt.nokia.com/services-partners/qt-in-education/qt-in-education-course-material

Nice! :)

I shall study them ASAP. ;)

andre

[quote author="Stavros Filippidis" date="1276863204"][quote author="QtK" date="1276863107"]I am currently reading the course materials and have found some typo's here and there. May be someone can review it and fix it. [/quote]

I suppose you could make a list of the typo's and send them to Hanne ;)[/quote]

Wouldn't it make sense to have them in a wiki or something like that, so that users can make such corrections themselves?

sfilippidis

[quote author="Andre" date="1278343859"][quote author="Stavros Filippidis" date="1276863204"][quote author="QtK" date="1276863107"]I am currently reading the course materials and have found some typo&#39;s here and there. May be someone can review it and fix it. [/quote]

I suppose you could make a list of the typo&#39;s and send them to Hanne ;)[/quote]

Wouldn't it make sense to have them in a wiki or something like that, so that users can make such corrections themselves?[/quote]

Yes, this sounds even better! :)

hlinaae

[quote author="Stavros Filippidis" date="1278344337"][quote author="Andre" date="1278343859"][quote author="Stavros Filippidis" date="1276863204"][quote author="QtK" date="1276863107"]I am currently reading the course materials and have found some typo&amp;#39;s here and there. May be someone can review it and fix it. [/quote]

I suppose you could make a list of the typo&amp;#39;s and send them to Hanne ;)[/quote]

Wouldn&#39;t it make sense to have them in a wiki or something like that, so that users can make such corrections themselves?[/quote]

Yes, this sounds even better! :)[/quote]

Agree! :)

I've now added a "wiki-page for this purpose":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/Typos_and_Corrections_to_the_Qt_in_Education_Course_Material. Please go ahead and start adding to it.

andre

Not quite what I had in mind. I was suggesting to put the materials in such a form that people can edit them in a wiki-like manner so such changes and corrections can be done by the end users directly. Just having a wiki page with errors seems a bit poitless. We already have a bug tracking system that can be used for that, right?

hlinaae

Ah - OK, I see. That makes the task more complicated than I first thought, then. We write the material in Open Office, so not so easy to convert to from wiki-pages..

john_god

I just recently discover the Course Material lectures. Well, I don't know who did it, but they are so very good, I just have to say THANK YOU. I started learning Qt from the Qt book, from Qtcentre, and Qt assistant examples. So my knowledge of Qt is somewhat disperse, I try to do something, I go looking for it, and do it, not necessary the easy or the correct way. I didnt know about QSignalMapper, I didn't know lots of widgets and layout details wich are covered in the lectures. They are very well structured, so keep up the good work.

viswesr

The course materials are very useful. Like others, I feel it should also be in a wiki format for users to edit / contribute. We should also keep the presentation format as such (i.e easy for instructors to use in a time bound class lecture). The wiki format can focus on "Qt Essentials Curriculum Block".

Could we start a wiki for this? What do you all say?

tobias.hunger

viswesr: Just hop into the wiki and get started;-)

viswesr

Started a new Wiki "Qt in Education Course Material":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/Qt_in_Education_Course_Material.

milot.shala

On 25th of September I've had a Qt presentation at SFK10 (Software Freedom Kosova 2010) Conference ("http://www.kosovasoftwarefreedom.org/":http://www.kosovasoftwarefreedom.org/) at University of Prishtina in Kosovo.

Last year (SFK09) I had similar Qt presentation but this year I've been more focused on live-coding (I've created a small application on Linux and tested in on a Nokia 5800), demos of my apps and Qt Quick.

It was great because:

The room was full!

In the audience there were University professors that teach programming and they were really impressed by the live coding part!

At the next day I received an email from one of the professors that was present during my speech offering me to make a more technical presentation for University professors maybe later to have a special course for Qt.

I already informed him about Qt in Education, upon my return from Qt Developer Days we will be meeting for further discussion.

xsacha

That's very exciting Milot. How was the live coding done? A 5800 connected to a laptop with Qt-Creator?

I've seen a few live coding sessions this year and they were all disasters :O. An OpenCL one where everyone fell asleep and an iPad one where the code/demo didn't work.

milot.shala

[quote author="xsacha" date="1291356559"]That's very exciting Milot. How was the live coding done? A 5800 connected to a laptop with Qt-Creator?

I've seen a few live coding sessions this year and they were all disasters :O. An OpenCL one where everyone fell asleep and an iPad one where the code/demo didn't work.[/quote]

It went pretty well and the audience loved it. I had two mobile phones with me, a Nokia 5800 and a E63. I had another preloaded application which was a SFK10 schedule on both phones.

During the live coding part I used the simulator that comes with Nokia Qt SDK and of course I installed it on the 5800 and I didn't install on E63, in the other hand I showed the small application that I created before the conference and I compiled and run the application on Linux just to show that it works pretty well.

milot.shala

Thing is that if you plan to do live coding, do something that you know it will work for sure or you know the context very well , I was doing live coding in free style as well, I asked the audience to come up with something simple for the topics covered and do that, on the other hand if you do porting, make sure you ported that previously and it worked, as I did on my talk.