It is finally there - out on the web! What is finally there, you ask? - The Qt in Education course material!
This is material we have been working on for.. well, quite some time. And now I am proud to let you know that it is out there - and available for use by teachers who would like to use Qt as part of a course they teach. You might also find it useful if you are new to Qt and would like to learn more.
You can take a look at the material on our new Qt in Education course material web page.
The material includes ten lectures with speaker notes and exercises to go with each lecture so that the students can test their knowledge at the end of the lecture. In addition we provide five labs that feature more advanced exercises, where the students are expected to combine what they've learned in several of the lectures and look up the documentation to be able to solve the task at hand.
So, why have we made it?
When I started as a Program Manager for the Qt in Education program 18 months ago, it wasn't a completely new role to me. It had in fact been part of previous roles I had in Trolltech, but this was the first time I could focus 100% on the educational sector, and supporting those universities who already use, or would like to use, Qt in their teaching.
The first thing on my list was of course to make teachers out there aware that we would like to support them.
But how do you find out whether a university uses Qt in any of their courses? You can't just call up the administration and ask. In fact even if the answer is "no" at the Computer Science department, the University might teach Qt to their mathematicians instead. This is the case at Oxford with their "C++ for Mathematicians" course.
A good example of Qt being taught to Computer Science students is at Virginia Tech, where they use Qt to teach their "Applied Software Design"
class.
We discovered this through Prof. Paul Ezust at Suffolk University - one of the authors behind Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt4
We figured the best way to learn about how and where Qt is being taught was to get people from the Qt community to tell us about their Qt usage instead. But for that to happen, there needs to be a benefit of doing so, right? So our next step has been to provide useful stuff for teachers.
As such we have created course material, which is obviously a big milestone, but we also started a dedicated Qt in Education track at Qt Developer Days, held Qt seminars at various universities, and we also now have a Qt in Education group on the Qt Developer Network.
The best way to receive information about everything that's going on with Qt in Education is to sign up for our Qt in Education newsletter
If you want share with us information you have about how Qt is being used in education you can email us directly at qt-education@nokia.com
And if you would like to influence what we do, join our group on Qt Developer Network!
Having lots of universities around the world use Qt for teaching is very good news for the entire Qt community because more quality Qt education equals more good Qt developers!
Happy teaching with Qt!
