[Linux-aus] Programs for education

[Greg Cockburn]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 10:16 PM, David Lyon <david.lyon at hackerpads.com>wrote:

> On 2013-11-02 22:44, Greg Cockburn wrote:
> > This is where we fall down, we don't teach *computers*, we teach
> > Enterprise Applications.
>
> Oh - I thought these days all the kids got to learn is facebook :-)
>

no idea what you are talking about ;-)


>
> I'm seriously not claiming that. Actually I think the education system
> is satisfactory for the most part. Some parts of it even rate as
> extremely good. What we lack in Australia is any vision of having a
> local computer industry as such. In Germany when I was living there I
> noticed it was much easier it was for people to jump from education into
> Industry and the same seemed true in the US and in Japan far more than
> here.
>

I think we can do better in so many ways. The key problem I am personally
seeing, we don't teach how to learn.

>
> A lot is being talked about bringing the standard of education up to
> the levels of Taiwan, China, Japan, UK, Germany, France, USA etc but to
> me it seems like a bridge too far.
>

Can't get there without a goal, no matter how big it is. You just need to
break it into smaller chunks.

>
> > Hopefully later in the syllabus they teach the fundamentals, the same
> > as is for
> > Mathematics (I went to school in NZ, so can only speak of it there,
> > plus it was 16 odd years ago).
>
> Not really. Nothing is taught in Australia to my knowledge about things
> like Injection-Moulding, plastics, and metal pressing. All the basics
> without such it's impossible to make whole computers if you don't know.
>

Funnily enough while I never got to do injection-moulding, I did play with
some plastics, and plenty of timber and metal as part of  Woodwork and
Metalwork classes at school.  Plus the school was always supportive of
going out to industry if they didn't have the right equipment even for your
*OWN* project or anything to do with school projects.  Regardless of
whether it was directly related to schooling, or a hobby and one of the
teachers was happy to supervise after school or during lunch, we could
pretty much work on what we wanted.  They saw their role was to nurture a
learning student. (at least that is how I saw it).  The same was for
computers. (we had Macs, Apple IIs, and x86s), no Linux, but I learnt CAD
at school, and other friends of mine learnt programming on the Apple IIs (I
was only interested in the electronics in those days).


> They do teach motherboard assembly and preloading operating systems at
> University level. It's possible to pick up some Linux experience there.
>

When you say "motherboard assembly" do you mean plugging a CPU, RAM and PSU
in?  What about motherboard *assembly*? What about motherboard design?
These things give you the fundamentals of how computers work. Maybe they
are done in Electronic Engineering...

G
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