A while ago I wrote in one of my previous posts that many things had happened during last few months and I’d like to share some of them with you. So here is the first thing…

As you probably know I am a PhD candidate in Institute of Computer Science on Warsaw University of Technology. Part of my responsibilities involves having academic activities with students. Last semestre I managed to make myself part of the “Programming Interactive Applications” course that shows students the basics of technologies such as WinAPI, .NET, MFC, XLib and Qt. I was asked to conduct a six hour course on Qt, which entered the course just a semestre earlier. It was a very big thing for me – one might say that it was a vocation for becoming a “Qt Apostle” (I admit I borrowed that term from Scott Collins) so I treated it very seriously.

I think the lecture came out quite fine. The biggest problem was to decide what to tell about and what to omit. I talked quite much about paradigms like meta-types, signals and slots, layouts and virtual method based event handling. Because of that I had less time to talk about more advanced things like Arthur (I just managed to talk a bit about device independence and window-viewport transformations) or Interview (which is a pitty because you know how I like it…). But thanks to that I had more time to present the graphics view framework.

 Apart from the lectures I were to give students two exercises (not conducting them though). The first one was about creating a simple image viewer using available widgets and the second one was to prepare a kitchen timer widget and a Designer plugin for it. Students seemed to be interested in the projects so I guess the choice was correct. Starting with the semestre that starts in a week I’ll be conducting the exercises as well, so maybe I’ll have additional time to brainwash… eem… present some more Qt knowledge to students.

All in all people seemed interested in the topic which gives me much satisfaction. I should probably change or update the contents of the lectures a bit, so I’m waiting for your fresh ideas and comments. There is enough knowledge (as well as motivation and urg to pass that knowledge) to make a dedicated course, but unfortunately I don’t think an average PhD student can make that happen.