Hello,
As a person with academic background, who in the "very old" times
(around 2007/2008) taught students about programming for Maemo 4
platforms with help of some imported N810's from Germany (yes, those
weren't available in Poland at all) I thought that nowadays there are
probably people connected with universities (lecturers, PhD students
etc.) who would want to do the same, but with Mer/Nemo or solutions
based on them like Sailfish and Jolla based phones. I also remember that
preparing such lectures and scenarios of laboratories required quite
some effort and digging through a lot of stuff on maemo.org, which was
on one side good, but on the other side sometimes people from academia
just don't have time for that in constant rush with other stuff.
To address that problem I thought about creating open educational
project whose aim would be preparing ready to use materials (like slide
presentations, some scenarios for laboratories, code examples or tasks
etc.) to teach about Mer/Nemo, Sailfish and others. In my opinion the
stuff on Mer/Nemo wiki is really, really great, but probably not for
average student, especially if he/she didn't have any experience with
such kind of projects. Moreover big companies who are developing other
platforms have usually some kind of academic programs providing this
kind of materials on portals, even with some gamification elements to
make learning more efficient and enjoyable. I don't even mention about
those companies providing devices and other hardware stuff for
laboratories usage. As a result it's much easier to make mobile
programming courses on universities about platforms from big players
like Google, Apple, Microsoft or Blackberry. I guess that determined
people like me that want to teach about interesting alternatives such as
Sailfish are in a small minority and it can be a real challenge to push
this kind of topics into course program, especially with no arguments
like ready to use materials, when convincing colleagues also involved in
teaching process at such courses.
In my opinion this is really a big issue that must be addressed sooner
or later and benefits are quite obvious - the more students will know
about Mer/Nemo the bigger chance that some of them might get involved in
active way like writing apps or contributing to open source platforms
such as Mer. Yes, in my opinion more people are needed in the community,
because for now it mainly consists of people previously involved in
Maemo or Meego (probably with N950 in their pockets) and there is lack
of fresh air (when comparing with what Canonical is for example doing -
attracting completely new people to their platform).
I've set up a repo where I will try to prepare such materials (which I
need to prepare anyway for the Fall semester, because I want to include
things connected with Mer/Nemo/Sailfish into two courses at least). I'm
looking forward to any help, contributions and ideas from people who are
interested in this topic - that is not limited to lecturers, but also
students and everyone who finds this matter interesting or important. By
the way I've given the project a name Dolphinaric - yeah, dolphins are
those clever and intelligent sea animals and the name was not used :)
So the address to repo (not much yet there):
https://github.com/Dolphinaric/dolphinaric_courses
For people seeking a place for more direct way to discuss, there is also
#dolphinaric IRC channel on Freenode. I would also like to set up a
mailing list, to not make a mess here ;) So I'm looking for suggestions
where to set up that (I tried to do that on Freelists.org, but did not
receive any response from them yet).
Best regards,
Filip
PS. I've posted this message on both mer-general and
devel@lists.sailfishos.org mailing list, but I STRONGLY SUGGEST to
discuss it on mer-general mailing list only to not cause chaos and cross
postings (I hope soon dedicated mailing list will be set up).
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