Mark Guzdial wrote:
> We do this, in a sense.  Visit
> http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/cs2340/Cases  -- there are over 100
> well-documented projects here for future students to use as examples.
> Students get extra credit for doing this.  Several of these ARE
> tutorials and other forms of documentation.

Looks like a lot of great stuff!

However, I'm not sure what the licensing status of these or the related
code is. It is unfortunate that most people who develop intellectual
property (ugly word) have so little conception of the legal and social
implications of that. Getting the students to think through the
licensing issues and the implications might be a good learning
experience (even if perhaps many CS programs might typically avoid
teaching this). It seems like every creative person should take a course
on intellectual property law (at least to know the basics and when to
consult a lawyer etc.) to be better able to ensure their creations
prosper as they wish them to.

On that note, anything the students could do that could become part of
the community code and documentation base (i.e. put contributions under
the Squeak license or a specific compatible license like BSD etc.) might
be of value to the students, giving them a sense of pride in an
accomplishment that was publically recognized. [Obviously, it would be
controversial and perhaps counterproductive to demand the students
actually release under a license, although I think most might release
something once it was finished.] That would help them learn to be part
of a larger effort and also think about the meaining of getting their
stuff to be used (no matter how small the contribution). Obviously what
the community needs might be different than the sensible way to teach
about basic concepts, but maybe there are some matches in there
somewhere (dcumenting basic classes etc.). And also obviously, too many
students unleashed on a open-software community might create a burden
for that community. Still, this indirectly adds a sort of apprenticeship
model to learning to program in Sqeuak, and there might be some value in
that.

Perhaps we as a community need a fine grained way of listing issues that
students (apprentices) could just pick up and respond to (i.e. we need a
comment for class XYZ that is under the Squeak license, or we need a
class that does XYZ that is under the Squeak or a compatible open soruce
license, or wouldn't it be nice if this bug was fixed under the Squeak
license?) Perhaps there is another issue here -- a bug or enhancement
tracking system (beyond this list) that students and faculty could
consult for immediately relevant class projects, combined with a way of
tracking the licensing status of contributions.

-Paul Fernhout
Kurtz-Fernhout Software 
=========================================================
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com