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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."
Maybe it's me, but 5,000 Dell computers all running XP suggests Microsoft Certified Systems Engineering.
I work for a research lab in a university and we do a lot of scientific computing and webapp development. Here it is UNIX variants and only UNIX variants. We use Debian Linux on our clusters, Mac OS X or Debian Linux on my Mac Pro or Mac Mini desktops. Knowledge about C/C++ and scripting languages is very important. We are recently interviewing candidates for an opening, and it is very sad to see people who cannot code without IDE and who think building the binary is equivalent to clicking the little button on the toolbar. If education needs to do one thing, then that should be to give students a broader view instead of limiting them to some false impressions. In that sense, UNIX is a much better tool because of its rich history and active development.
High School seniors are between 4 and 8 years away from working in an engineering field. That's enough time for things to change considerably, and even if it weren't, the operating system really doesn't make that much difference. If you could give them some experience using the apps that will be relevant to them, that might be a little more useful, but that space is so broad that there's no way you could know what will be needed.
I'd make sure you pick a platform that runs the software the teachers want to use for classes. If that software is available on multiple platforms, then pick the one that is most cost-effective, considering acquisition and maintenance both.
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XP may be close to EOL, but it has massive support behind it still. There are numerous applications that extend its features, make it very easy to customize, etc. Not to mention most of the bugs and such that are left are well documented and easy to fix or work around.
Any research relying on results produced by close-sourced software is voodoo.
Well, then 98% of published chemical research is voodoo. Companies aren't going to write open software to control the $750K spectrometer they just sold you, and to be perfectly honest, I don't think I'd use software off of Sourceforge to control an investment of that type, anyway. Nd-YAG lasers don't grow on trees, unfortunately.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
IMHO, teaching programming without a computer is like trying to teach math without using numbers. I mean the arabic numbering system is basically a shorthand way of writing down polynomials where 'x' is always 10. The numbers have a reality quite apart from their representation and getting that is one of the most fundamental and important ideas in math.
But really, starting there is a bad idea.
People get excited and enthused by results. Nobody is going to be excited and enthused by a set of principles that don't have any connection to anything else they know. Getting people excited about learning is the biggest part of the battle.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Labs that build their own equipment from scratch tend to stick with OSS stuff, labs that buy pre-built instruments tend to use windows based control software. That is actually one of the splits that makes answering the OP's question in any useful way impossible. What OS scientists and engineers use is pretty heavily dependent on their needs, and needs vary wildly.
There is no platform that will satisfy all objectives; arguments can be made for Win, OSX and Linux.
Of course, my vote would be for Linux. Let's remember that this is for a high school. Octave is more than capable of serving as a matlab replacement.
R has now supplanted S-Plus as an industry-standard (at least academia-wise) statistical programming language, one I also use frequently.
Between octave and R, and the other general purpose programming languages that are a breeze to develop with in a Linux environment, there is a great deal of important scientific work you can do with free software.
Linux is also the only platform that makes sense when you start needing to crunch lots of data on many servers, especially with a small budget. Linux is standard on all academic clusters I have seen. Give these students the skills to manage data crunching on a small cluster of linux machines and you will do them a tremendous favour.
If you have some tools which are proprietary and specialised, you can easily set up a couple of windows/osx machines for their use specifically. But it's hard to beat the value of Linux as a general purpose scientific platform.