[TOS] gifted high school student

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Chris Tyler <chris at tylers.info> wrote:
>
> Hi Robert,
>
> I'd agree with David and Matt that Waterloo (top school) and UBC (local
> to you) are good options for a Computer Science program in Canada. These
> are traditional CS programs with a strong emphasis on math and theory.
>
> As an alternative, here at Seneca we offer a solid undergrad program in
> Software Development (BSD). This has a different emphasis than CS
> programs -- less theory and more practical software development, in
> multiple languages, on multiple platforms, and with strong open source
> participation opportunities.
>
> I'd also agree with David Nally that there's nothing to keep your
> student from directly jumping into one or more open source communities
> and going as deep as he wants -- Fedora, Mozilla, and other projects are
> very welcoming to new contributors (and Fedora is one of the main
> upstreams for RHEL, which ties into your students' interest in obtaining
> his RHCE).
>
> (And THANK YOU for teaching HS students Python, C, and C++ and for
> exposing them to open source! I wish there were many more high school
> teachers offering their students those opportunities).
>

Thanks for all the responses. My student and I appreciate the comments.

As for languages, I noticed a big improvement in student success and
interest when I switched my intro class from C++ to Python years ago.
I never made the switch to Java and don't intend to. The biggest
geewiz bling that students really love is GUI programming using
pyFLTK. pyFLTK is amazing for it's simplicity and concise code.

In my senior course we do procedural C++ and some C then go back to
Python for OOP and network programming and other fun stuff. The only
other language I would consider teaching in the future would be
golang.

Cheers

-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada