Qt in Education
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!
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Where can people report errors?
I see this for example in the slides of lesson 1:
“QObject *o = new QPustButton;”
To answer my own question:
This blog post directs to a webpage wich directs to a forum wich directs to a wiki.
This could be more integrated or coordinated.
http://developer.qt.nokia.com/groups/qt_in_education/wiki/Typos_and_Corrections
great !
really good job
more more more
and a QtCreator more and more user friendly!
the learning curve is the grail in this world where coders rush on the more “easy” solution
@ tbscope
Don’t take things out of context and don’t add your own typos.
Actually those lesson 1 clides have these lines
>
> * Qt extends C++ with macros and introspection
> …
> QObject *o = new QPushButton;
> o->metaObject()->classname(); // Returns “QPushButton”
> …
Amd that’s correct.
@ tbscope
Don’t take things out of context and don’t add your own typos.
Actually those lesson 1 clides have these lines
>
> * Qt extends C++ with macros and introspection
> …
> QObject *o = new QPushButton;
> o->metaObject()->className(); // Returns “QPushButton”
> …
Sorry about my typio
I think this is a great initiative, however I beleive more resources should be allocated to fix all the lack of information around. Documentantion is spread all over and in my case, QtMobility 1.1 documentation simply don’t work. Just try searching for orientation and then try finding one link that’s not broken.
And worse, with the .org site off, lot’s of knowledge is unaccessible, making the Qt developer life simply frustrating.
just few remarks after a (fast) read
* lesson/lab about QtQuick is too compact, quite light. What about make 2 part, the 2nde focusing on C++/QML interaction, full duplex way
* perhaps quite out of subject, but I, and perhaps some coders I guess, like to read a lesson about the integration and “daily” use of Git in QtCreator. Based on the creation of a project, and some classic use of git
Thanks for all comments. Glad you seem to like the material.
@Fabio: Agree that it isn’t always easy to find the right information. Sorry about that. I will make sure your concrete examples are dealt with. Also: More resources are going to be put into structuring and developing learning materials for Qt, so improvements are underway.
@michel: More Qt Quick material is in the plans for this half. Thanks for the input. Not sure about the plans for Git usage, but will make sure the right people get your message.
Thank you for a great initiative. Availability of free presentations and books about Qt will boost technology popularity not only among students, but also among programmers.
Offtopic: the quality of PDF presentation is superb. If not a secret, how it was created? I suspect that you have used TeX with some addins? Or is it something else? Is it possible to look at the presentation source, at last for one of them?
Translation work should be carried out using TM-enabled tools (e.g. OmegaT), a resource should be established to manage this work and to exchange TMs. As I can see, noything of the kind definitely exists for Russian, so I expect the poor translation quality in terms of terminology and consistency.
By the way, multilingual Qt glossary should be established; I’ve just looked through a Russian printed book on Qt 4.5 and understood that this task is No.1 now, before the translation begins.
I agree with @orlusha that TM need to be shared. I can suggest that someone in Qt team can put such TM under version control system (GIT) and write a short how-to for using Omegat and TM for translations. After that, translators wil be able to get latest TM from version control and share they own TM.
I expected lectures, but all you put there were demo outlines and slideshows. I thought I could use this to quickly start programming in Qt, but I guess not.
@yman: You are right in that the course material is not meant to be a getting started tutorial for learning Qt. For such please see: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/gettingstarted.html or http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/tutorials.html . The Qt in Education course material is meant as a help for teachers who want to teach Qt as part of their class.
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