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I have moved to newlyancient.com and will be writing regularly there! Content on this domain is no longer updated, but will be maintained as an archive in its original form.

Tag Archive for 'programming'

Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP)

1 year, 9 months ago 3 Comments

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GHOP

In yet another stroke (of luck) for open source, Google has announced that they will be financing and supporting an initiative to bring open source to high school students. Google Highly Open Participation Contest is an opportunity for “pre-university” students to work on one of ten top open source projects and get paid for it. For every 3 tasks completed, students will get receive $100 USD. In addition, every participant receives a free TV shirt and certification of their experience. Tasks range from documenting Moodle to programming Joomla, so everyone can join in. This has great potential for raising a whole new generation of open source developers. Here’s the scoop:

The Google Summer of Code program has been a joint labor of love between Google and the open source community for the past three years, and the results have been spectacular: hundreds of college students have been introduced to open source software, thousands of people across the globe have begun development together and millions of lines of open code have been produced, 4 million last year alone. We’ve been particularly proud of this program and how much it has helped the community and we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ways we can continue helping open source projects find even more contributors. Today, we’re pleased to announce the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, our new effort to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of open source development, from fixing bugs to writing documentation and doing user experience research.

This is certainly a great step forward in open source education. So far, the response has been great. (Many of the tasks are already claimed) In particular, I think this helps to teach students what is really going into the tools they use. Maybe your school will end up using the Moodle module created; or you’ll contribute some key documentation to Apache. I believe basic programming skills are at least as useful as basic art understanding, and thus should be taught in schools. I’m glad to see Google agrees and is putting their formidable financial and technical bulk behind such a worthy cause.

However, I would like to see a little more variety in projects for the future. All the projects this year relate to web development. While I understand why Google would want to focus on the web as a medium, I think most students are more apt to become engaged if they directly use the end project. For instance, I imagine many (smart) students would love the opportunity to improve OpenOffice or Azureus, product commonly used by teens.

No matter what class you teach or take in school, there’s something you can do for open source. Love art? Make a logo. Teach English? Have your students write some documentation. Everyone can participate in open source, and GHOP is teaching a whole new generation of programmers to perpetuate a culture of transparency and openness. Now, I’m off to finish up my database preset for Moodle.

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Programming Programs

2 years, 1 month ago 10 Comments

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As I was reviewing my schedule for my freshmen year of high school, I was particularly interested in what languages I was taking. Though I signed up for French and Latin, French is the only language I will apparently be able to take. Through this thinking, I thought of the fact that we really should be expanding language programming into new directions. Instead of simply teaching traditional romance languages, schools should expand teachings into the fields of computers. Instead of keeping programming and computer education in a few AP classes, programming should be given equal emphasis as foreign languages. Just like foreign languages in most schools, programming would not be required but would be recommended. In fact, the ability to program is going to become far more useful than the ability to speak a foreign language. As translation software becomes more and more robust, the ability to speak a foreign language becomes less and less useful. Meanwhile, as the presence of computers increases, the ability to communicate effectively with machines becomes more useful. I don’t mean high level programming, I mean simple programming. The ability to run through a list and change one value, the ability to modify a database, and such simple tasks are increasingly useful and even expected in many fields. In light of this, programming should be recognized as a vital part of a high school curriculum.