TXLF: TexOS teaching open source

Posted Aug 9, 2012 7:48 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
Parent article: TXLF: TexOS teaching open source

Good article. As an aside, 'grades eight through ten' only makes sense if you're an American. I can only guess how old they might be by assuming that grades count years and thus these are probably teenagers.

Teaching the principles rather than just 'look it's free' is definitely the right way to go -- after all, if you don't care about copyright law (like essentially everyone not actually employed by a corporation that makes money from its current form) *everything* is free of charge these days.

I would think that introducing people to programming if you don't yourself have the fire is a bit of a lost cause. The really dedicated ones will have been hooked for years already! (But, yes, it would be nice to, ahem, hook a few more. This sounds disturbingly like propagandizing or drug pushing, only programming is *good* for you. Honest! Look what it's made of me, er oops)

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TXLF: TexOS teaching open source

Posted Aug 10, 2012 22:59 UTC (Fri) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]

It's actually going to vary a little from state to state and even district to district (in the cut-off ages for starting school, and, in the case of 6th grade, whether that is elementary or "junior high"/"middle school"). The only real salient point is that the project bumped it up to the next age group.

Also, just so everyone is 100% clear, I was not attempting to suggest that HeliOS is dropping the ball or doing a disservice through its own work -- far from it -- I was only observing that I found it interesting that TexOS has a different approach, and one that has value of a different sort.

Nate