The GnuVision Blog

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

If you are a student at MIT, your first step into the world of CS/Electrical engineering would be via this
amazing course which […]

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TC (Theory of Computation) is an integral part of the CS curriculum - but most of it flies above the head of the average student. The reasons are: (a) the subject itself is hard and requires the students to have the ability to think deeply, (b) most of the prescribed text books have a […]

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Kirby Urner talks about some aspects of an intelligent CS curriculum here. The Python edu-sig is a good place to peek into occassionally to get glimpses of the effort being put in by teachers like Kirby to introduce computers meaningfully into the school curriculum.

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Operating Systems design is very much a `hands-on’ course; there is no point in learning lots of text-book theory unless you get your hands dirty with code. What kind of code do you ask your students to play with? The Linux kernel is one option - but I feel it is too complex as […]

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This month’s Communications of the ACM has an interesting article by David A Patterson (of RISC fame) on `CS education for the 21st century’. He makes several interesting suggestions - I found two of them to be really exciting:

Make students work on real world open source systems - ask them to document, bug-fix […]

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I am having fun running a model railroad with some of my students from Srikrishnapuram engg college!
The idea is to control toy trains (running on electrified tracks) using some form of real-time Linux (say RTAI/Fusion). It’s a fun way to learn a lot about PC interfacing and writing programs with mutliple threads, semaphores and […]

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TC = Theory of Computation
In the beginning, you thought you couldn’t do without iteration.
Then you realized that you can do away with iteration and do stuff recursively.
Then came the realization that what you call `iteration’ is just another form of `tail recursion’ (Lisp guys love to call it mere `syntactic sugar’)
The power of the […]

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Thanks to Nisha for this interesting link:
The Perils of Java Schools
The author has some good points to make. Indian engineering schools are not far behind their US counterparts when it comes to following this `trend’. In Kerala, only the Calicut University has so far kept its distance from Java. The existing syllabus is really […]

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Allen B Downey has written an interesting book on semaphores and synchronization - I am going through it at random - maybe I will steal a few ideas and use them in my class!
The Little Book of Semaphores

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What do “parliament” and “partial men” have in common - well, they are anagrams, one sentence can be obtained from the other by simply interchanging the individual characters. Look here if you want some
really interesting ones …
Jon Bentley, in his classic Programming Pearls develops an interesting program for discovering anagram sets […]

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