Most Useful OS For High-School Science Education?

Clayperion writes "I teach at a high school program for gifted students which emphasizes math, science, and technology. Currently we have two computer labs for the students: A new programming lab (all Dell PCs running XP, MS Visual C++, Eclipse, and SolidWorks for programming and CAD) and an old general-purpose lab (all Macs running OS X 10.3, with software ranging from some legacy OS 9 science applications to MathCad). Most of our students eventually pursue graduate degrees in science and engineering, and we would like them to have experience with the tools they will find out in industry. As we look to replace the old machines, there has been a push to switch to PCs with XP so that there is only a single platform to support. There are over 5000 machines on the district's network and the IT department is very small (fewer than 10 people), so the fewer hardware and software differences between the machines, the better. Without opening a flame war as to which one is 'better,' I'd like to know what those of you in the science and engineering fields actually use more in your labs (hardware, OS, software), so that we can decide which platform to support. It will most likely have to be either XP or OS 10.6, with very restricted permissions to students and teachers, as that is the comfort level of IT and administration, but I'll push for whatever would benefit the students the most."

Comments

Linux in our labs

[King InuYasha]

Most of our labs in college use a mix of Fedora and Ubuntu Linux, with some Solaris speckled around.

I'd probably go for Fedora, since a lot of students will likely be working on some Fedora derivative, and it is easier (in my opinion) than Ubuntu to administer. However, it's really up to you.

I've also heard that many of the co-op companies our college partners with use some form of Linux. Though, for obvious reasons, a few design oriented companies use Mac OS X, though that may change in the future.

Windows is a rarity, from what I've seen and heard.

Technically real world use.... OSX

[dbarrycoyle]

I work at NASA and have many university colleagues I work with as well. A recent IP survey I had IT do at GSFC in MD showed a Mac OSX installation base of about 30%. This is similar at my freind's universities... at least in the physics and engineering depts. We recently moved our 20 or so PC's over to Mac a few years ago and have been very happy. I was able to show I saved the government approximately $60K-$90K a year in gained productivity and reduced IT support, salary, etc.... So, while Windows is used mostly now by the Best Buy consumer level base, which is 80% of the "market", the professional technical use of OSX is much higher. I suggest having a mix of new machines if possible and taking your own data. Track how often the machines are used, under repair, software costs, and how the students take to them and make your own conclusions. Good luck.

What career path do most of your students pursue ?

[tuxidriver]

It will depend heavily on what path your students pursue.

I've done a mixture of hardware design and firmware development for both storage peripheral companies and IC houses. What I mostly see is:

• Embedded development: Roughly a 50/50 mixture of Windows and Linux. Most compilers for embedded applications (e.g. Green Hills and ARM) are available for either platform. The same compilers are not available for Mac.
• Digital IC design: Linux and some Solaris on big iron. In my experience, there is 0 use of Windows in this space. Most companies appear to be moving towards Linux.
• IC verification (validating the design prior to producing the reticules used to manufacture the chips) is also 100% Linux with 0 use of Windows.
• Analog IC design: Also strictly Linux and Solaris on big iron. Again, no use of Windows in this space.
• Board level electrical design: Mostly Windows.
• Mechanical design (Solid Works, etc.): Mostly Windows. One company I worked for used IRIX on Silicon Graphics workstations for 3D modelling, although they did eventually transition to Solid Works on Windows.
• The modeling work I've seen/done (modeling Mueller-Muller clock recovery, Viterbi decoders, LDPC decoders, etc. used in communications systems) has been a 50/50 mixture of Windows and Linux (in some cases with the models developed with GCC and written to be portable across platforms). I believe this is mostly due to the compute resources that the companies I've worked for had on hand.

I have yet to see any significant use of Mac's, except as clients to log into Linux workstations. Almost all IC design and verification is done on some POSIX compliant OS because of the the requirements of the tools. IC houses I've worked for generally have large numbers of 32, 64, and 128 way multi-processor systems with huge amounts of RAM. Windows XP is simply not able to take full advantage of these large systems and the tools require this much horsepower to be effective. I also have noted that many IC designers generally seem to prefer the power of a good CLI over GUI point-in-click file managers. There is also a lot of scripting in these environments, mostly in Perl (although I've also need shell script and Python used). Linux and similar operating systems lend themselves more for this sort of work.

As for tools, I would suggest that you seriously look at trying to give your students at least a taste of such tools as MatLab, MathCAD, AutoCAD, and S. There are free equivalents for MatLab such as Scilab and Octave as well as Python packages such as SciPy, NumPy, and MatPlotLib (which I sometimes use for modeling). I know that languages such as S+ (or the free R language) are sometimes also used for statistical analysis. If you want to give your more advanced students a taste of chip design, consider the free offerings from Xilinx along with a few of their FPGA evaluation boards (available through DigiKey).

I hope this helps.

Re:Teach the kids to learn...

[Anonymous Coward]

Octave is MatLab enough for someone who is just learning.
For highschool or first year undergrad stuff it can be considered matlab without the fluff
ie. graphical interface/array editor, built in clicky menus and ezplot. I can't think of how this would be a disadvantage when it comes to teaching people how things work.
I've heard that its floating point isn't as good (second hand), but I've never run into any problems (in undergrad physics).