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.
Well i am reading this blog quite late, but indeed you have done a nice job
Good that you could spare some time for gv framework.
May be you could have talked a bit about plugins with qt4 i feel. Did you ?
I remember I had such intentions and I did say something about it, but not too much. This time I have one more hour of the lecture (they started this week) and I’m already ahead of schedule, so there is a chance I manage to say something more. I’m certainly going to say more about graphics view, especially that I finally had time to do something more serious with it myself.
Are all the lectures targeted towards newbies ? If not you can also speak about optimization techniques with gv
BTW just for curiosity, are your students more attracted towards gv rather than any other topic ?
The lecture is part of a bigger course. Participants are just before starting their B.Sc. projects, so they are not newbies to programming, but one has to assume they are newbies to Qt.
Last time I spoke of reference counting and implicit sharing. I’m not sure they were “into the subject” enough to understand it. Nowadays the computer market goes towards increasing requirements instead of optimizing solutions, so some people don’t care about such things.
They didn’t use the graphics view in practice during the excercises, but they seemed interested in it during lectures. The level of interest was not breathtaking though.
This time I have to do better – unfortunately my laptop’s drivers don’t like advanced OpenGL features and the new QtDemo app just crashes when I run it, so I have to stick with slides and Designer.
Thanks for your replies
We actually in India don’t have chance for lectures in technologies like qt while doing graduation. The courses are more leaned towards java and dot net. Fortunately i got chance to learn qt. Its really worthwhile
Anyway I wish you good luck for your lectures
Hope your students get motivated enough to start interaction in qtcentre 😉