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Written by Elin Waring

Last Saturday while lots of people were working on issues in the tracker as part of PBF, I was giving a talk to computer science teachers in San Antonio, Texas at the CS/IT symposium. It was a great coincidence that PBF was going on at the same time since so many students were making important contributions by fixing bugs and creating documentation and my talk a was all about how encouraging their students to participate in free and open source software projects would help them learn computer science.

It was a great event, and it was great to meet so many passionate teachers. I was stunned to learn that the number of college computer science majors in the United States has been declining. Well, I hope Joomla! can help do something about that, whether through GHOP or just by having a community that is welcoming to students. It was also fun for me to combine my interest in pedagogy with my interest in Joomla! :).

My session had a full house with lots of knowlegable people. The focus of my talk was on how participating in a real project, with hundreds of thousands of users and in which you have to work in a collaborative manner can teach things that are hard to get out of even the best book. It was so hard to chose, but I highlighted two GHOP projects, Marieke van der Tuin's Digg module and Michael Casha's Narellan Rural Fire Brigade website and the report he wrote on it. I said that I thought these were reasonable kinds of projects for high schools students to undertake. I also talked about how Miarieke and Michael have become such important contributors to Joomla!.

So why am I posting this in the bug squad blog? Well, we do have a lot of high school and college students in th JBS and we would love to have more. So, come on and join us.

Here are the slides from my presentation. Thanks to the Computer Science Teacher's Association for inviting me to speak and Leslie Hawthorn from Google for putting them in touch with me.

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Michael Hamanaka makes this comment

Monday, 15 September 2008

This is an amazing way to promote and get some outreach to a younger crowd. I wish there would have been such a vibrant community back in the days of Mambo in 2004, I would have jumped all over having the opportunity to get involved. I hope that young people are not discouraged by not being selected to be part of the Google summer programs. Anybody can jump in at anytime, the younger the better. From my experiences in California, alot of Joomla admins I meet are still in some sort of schooling. I expect an avalanche of Joomla community members as the demand and budgets for websites increase.
Wilco Jansen makes this comment

Wednesday, 23 July 2008

Looks like a great session you had there...thanks for representing the project there Elin!
HarryB makes this comment

Thursday, 10 July 2008

More related information wriiten in a much more clear and lucid English than my last comment!

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos110.htm
Louis Landry makes this comment

Thursday, 10 July 2008

Thanks for the report Elin.
HarryB makes this comment

Wednesday, 09 July 2008

Quote:
I was stunned to learn that the number of college computer science majors in the United States has been declining
Students majoring in both engineering and CompSci have been streadily decling since around the year 2000. Inbitially the decine was attributed to the burst of the 1990's bubble, which led to layoffs and flattening out of the inflated salary structures created during 1990's.

Additionally, many entry level jobs have disappeared here in the US due to outsourcing of services to other part of the globe that have much lower cost IT and engineering resources.

As a result, kids to day do not view IT and engineering as prestigious, high paying career paths.