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Advice On Teaching Linux To CS Freshmen?
copb.phoenix writes "I'm a sophomore Computer Science student teaching computing labs to a freshman class, getting ready to go over the major ins and outs of the Linux terminal and GUI. While I have my own ideas and the professor over this class to lean on, I've found it difficult to get the few students that I've tried to teach in the past to connect the dots and understand how it relates to what they already know about computers. Does anybody out there have any advice on how to engage and inspire our upcoming class? (Perhaps important: Our machines are running Ubuntu Hardy.)"
You've given us rather little in regards to guidance. Is this class part of a larger arc focusing on security? Programming?
Many GUI applications can be controlled via GUI commands. Showing this helps students understand the link between the magic that goes on under the hood, and the actual action that takes place to make that happen.
Sure, not everything is a GUI shell over a CLI program, but the concept of typing a command isn't that different from one of making an API call to Qt or GTK+.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I'd start with a two-pronged approach.
1. GUI. Using something like Ubuntu, although I'm generally a CentOS bigot, teach them how to do all the things they know how to do in Windows: download and install software (using apt, for instance) and how to add an icon to the desktop. Teach 'em where to find applications of interest.
2. Start teaching the command line. There are times when a GUI... anyone's GUI... is too cumbersome/restrictive to do things quick and dirty.
2a. introduce them to 'script' and the concept of shell (batch) scripting.
2b. as an addendum to 2a, above, give 'em an overview of the major shells and explain why Tom Christiansen thinks csh is totally unsuited for scripting.
Don't preach about how much better Linux is than Windows... If they continue, they'll understand themselves. If they fall by the wayside, they never would have understood, anyway.
Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by tenure.
Really, if they are going to be any good, they will most likely ALREADY know what Linux is and how it works.
If they don't, really, don't bother them with it. It'll just confuse them.
Really, if they are going to be any good, they will most likely ALREADY know what Linux is and how it works.
That's exactly the approach that makes most people who try Linux give up after a very short time. I personally tried it twice and found any problems I encountered making things work had no simple step by step instructions on how to fix.
This is a joke, i hope. It sounds elitist and exclusionary. A lot of great hackers are self taught. But, there a many people who learn by seeking the help of of others. There is nothing wrong with that. Who is to say they don't already know what Linux is? Do *you* know what Linux is and how it works? I've been using it for over 12 years, and I sure as heck don't! I still rely on the knowledge of other people to make the best use of the tools I have available. Some might argue that this is what it takes to be "any good".
Whether or not they have used Linux in the past, it seems like the kind of thing that a CS student (even a first year) should be more than capable of handling for themselves. Sure, teach them about the architecture, or give them tasks that will require them to learn more advanced features of the OS, but I'd worry if the submitter really needs to teach the "major ins and outs of the Linux terminal and GUI" to a bunch of prospective computer scientists.
You won't get any sound advice if you don't tell us the background of your students. It is the most important thing in any tutoring class. If they have no idea what an OS is, perhaps you should start there. If they know how to use Windows (and understand what an operating system is actually doing), perhaps you could start by making a comparison of the two systems. Oh, and please, do not start with the "on UNIX everything is a file" thing. This has never, ever, helped anyone at that stage. Perhaps you could make a historical review to show, e.g. that in the before time, DOS was the OS and Windows was a GUI. Then tell them that Linux is the OS and Gnome is the GUI. If they get that, then jumping from DOS to Bash will be easy. And some general advice: If possible, do not guide them through a trivial task as a tutorial to show them how "things are done". I have always found such tutorials boring and uninspiring. Instead, give them a book, a manual, an online link or whatever where they can search for stuff and an easy task to perform. Make it like a competition: "let's see who can figure it out fiiiiiirst!" kind of thing. Also, remember that it has to be something that they can accomplish by looking in the material you gave them. The exercise is not for pumping up your own ego when you come to them after two hours with an answer that they could have never found.
What can you do in Slackware that is impossible in Ubuntu?
Feeling leet.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Teach one half of the class vi, and the other half emacs. Then join the class back together for a discussion seminar.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm assuming that this is your first time teaching anything (at least officially... we all teach often in our lives) and so my advice will dwell more on that then the technical aspects.
As a teacher, your responsibility is to help them learn. Remember that learning takes place inside the student's head; you can present the information, but if it they don't learn it, it is not a success.
1) Some people have indicated that the students "should" know certain things. I'm assuming that the class has no pre-requisites, so you shouldn't be assuming that they know anything. Many people who do things like that do so to make themselves feel better; these students are the ultimate newbs, and treat them like you'd like to be treated. Remember that they are not stupid, just uneducated, and they are in your class to correct that.
2) When you give an assignment, make sure you have done it yourself, on a box that has nothing more installed on it than what they will have installed on theirs. Nothing is so frustrating for students and embarrassing for instructors as an assignment that can't be done because something silly wasn't set on their boxes, such as path variables.
3) Remember that things that don't take you very long will take them many times longer, probably 3-5x as long. So if the assignment you give them takes you an hour to do,... You may want to give them that much work, but make sure it's because you planned it, not because you didn't think it would take that long. I would also recommend giving an estimated time, which should be for the average student it class, and tell them that if it is taking them longer, they need to get help somewhere.
4) Read through the assignments carefully, making sure that they are unambiguous. Not just to you, with your great wealth of knowledge, but to someone of the students' level.
5) Plan to spend significantly more time than expected on all this. This includes time in class explaining things that you expected them to know or thought were obvious and outside the class preparing your lectures, labs, etc. Until you've taught a class 2-3 times, there are always time sinks that you didn't anticipate.
Good luck!!!
If you consider vi simple as opposed to a complex tool, then Linux is pretty much beyond me, also.
I'm biased.. But I think that the concept of pipes can really be impressive.. so
ps aux | grep username | grep -v grep | awk '{print "kill -9 "$3}' | bash
is awesome to understand.
Have them do a dpkg -l on a box and make an install script for hundreds of packages. Have them hunt for credit cards #'s using regular expressions, then pipe those through a cc# validator script (yes how to use a computer for evil-- a nice weeklong break of doing bad things).
Teach them how to use Wget to stalk on facebook... heck that will keep them engaged the most, though it does rack up their dark side force points a little too quickly.
What good first year students should have difficulty handling is handling their time well enough while they obsessively dig into the computer systems around them. You shouldn't have to teach them about Linux, you should have to teach them about how to lay off the obsessive installing, poking, modifying, developing, etc.
If you have to push them /towards/ computing, they're not going to be any good at computing. They should get into something else quickly.
[...] Teaching Linux [...]
Best thing is to not "teach Linux," but to "teach on Linux."
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
If this is a trade school then start right away teaching them how to set up a LAMP system as others have suggested. However if this is a university then do not teach Linux. Teach concepts. Linux is just one of various places to implement or try out these concepts. The LAMP system is something a university student should be figuring out on his/her own time.
... So in a compilers class the professor taught the concepts and theories behind parsing, code generation and optimization and the TA taught you how to use lex and yacc under BSD to implement a compiler for your class assignments. Similarly in a graphics class the professor taught the math and theory of 3D graphics, transformations, perspective, hidden line/object removal, etc and the TA taught you how to use dedicated graphics workstations (today this would just be OpenGL). Now if you wanted to use a different environment and tools you were free to do so but you were on your own.
My undergrad CS was in a unix-based environment(*). Professors in class taught concepts that could be applied in a variety of different environments. Teaching assistants (TA) in study/discussion sessions taught implementation detail like editors, compilers and other tools for the environment provided by the school - which in this case was BSD, vi, cc, lex, yacc,
So if you are a university and your labs are Linux based, great. Your TA's should help students with all the implementation details of getting their assignment going under Linux. However Linux should not appear in the classroom that much, it is just the tool of the day, more of an implementation detail than a core concept. The university classroom should spend most of its time on concepts that transcend the tools of day, regardless of whether that tool of the day is MS Windows, Mac OS X or Linux; or Direct 3D or OpenGL.
(*) FWIW this was a DEC VAX based environment. I would have loved to have had a Linux or FreeBSD running on my PC rather than having to dial in over a modem from home when not on campus.
What can you do in Slackware that is impossible in Ubuntu?
In Slackware, you learn how to do things on any Linux distro. In Ubuntu, you only learn how to do things in Ubuntu, Debian, and Debian derivatives. I owe to Slackware the fact that I can sit down and work with any Linux distro out there. It doesn't include its own special tools for anything, so you are forced to do everything the "standard Linux way," which is the way that works on every distro (with some special exceptions, like DSL).
This isn't flamebait. I teach community college IT courses, and I would agree that if someone's a CS major and has to be dragged into checking out Linux, that person would probably ultimately be happier switching majors.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
These are CS students. Discounting the ones who will be quickly switching majors or dropping out, sed, awk and regex are going to convert Windows/Mac users to command line Linux.
Really, it's just plain mean to wait until senior year for the weed out class. Freshman year is the time to ditch people who think that a love of playing computer games means that they will get to enjoy a well-paid career as a game designer.
This is flamebait. Computer Science has nothing to do with computers and nothing to with operating systems, Linux included. Computer Science is a subset of Mathematics, and like Mathematics, predates computers and operating systems by about 6 thousand years or so. There is no such thing as software engineering in the same sense that there is no such thing as mathematics engineering. Programmers are not computer scientists, and neither are systems operators or administrators. If any of these occupations are your goal, perhaps you should consider other more pragmatic disciplines and avoid the strictly academic ones, such as Computer Science.
The Admin and the Engineer
If they haven't already looked at linux, it's because they lack the innate curiosity to find out more about their chosen profession.
These are the types who will mostly not graduate beyond "I can admin a server because I know where to point and click" anyways.
Even the simplest of tools, like vi or ssh, are pretty much beyond them.
Wow, what an arrogant, asinine point of view. These are college freshmen that we're talking about here. Yes, there's a good chance that many of them have had no exposure to Linux, since statistically speaking, most college freshmen probably come from households which have only used Windows or Apple PCs. They're majoring in computer science because they want to learn about computers, not because they already know about them, duh.
I'm glad that I didn't have teachers, parents, or friends with this attitude. When I started out as a computer science major, I knew my Commodore 64 in and out, but I had maybe touched an Intel-based PC a handful of times. I was dumb as dirt too, and I didn't know a damn thing about various Unix- or PC-based editors. I was motivated, though, so I came up to speed. Believe it or not, you were dumb as dirt at one point, too. Back when vi and ssh were beyond you (and I'm 100% sure that at one point, they were), how would you have liked it had someone told you that those simple tools were pretty much beyond you, and that you probably would never graduate beyond "I can admin a server because I know where to point and click"? Such comments are completely non-productive, and irrelevant to the submitter's question.
Maybe some of them will drop out of CS. Maybe some of them really don't understand what they're in for and will leave. But then again, I'll bet that there are quite a few who are going to college to learn about stuff they want to know, not more about stuff they already knew. Some will undoubtedly be part of the next generation of people who will make fun of you someday as one of those old fogies who can't keep up with the stuff they're working on.
Linux is one of the potential components of your workflow as a computer scientist, and one of the major potential platforms for any work you may want to do. A mathematician who spends their life working in set theory still needs to know what differential equations are, and what they mean.
Software engineering is a critical component of computer science, because computer science isn't mathematics, they are deeply related and intertwined, but not exactly the same. Computer science is about what you can do with information, that includes how you organize it. Computer science is both more and less than pure math, and different schools emphasize comp sci very differently, some are right on the metal focusing on building from hardware up, others work from pure math down, (and if you're in the area, waterloo starts at pure math and works down, Laurier which is basically in the same place starts with hardware and works up). You cannot actually implement the vast majority of ideas in computer science without some basic skills in software engineering, nor can you communicate effectively with other computer scientists about what ideas they have, or what ideas you have. Computer scientists and physicists aren't engineers, (and I count myself as both a physicist by training and work and a computer scientist by training now), but you need to know some of their tools to do your job. True, a purely theoretical physicist doesn't use a whole lot of electrical engineering. But a experimental physicist uses a lot of engineering materials regularly. A purely theoretical computer scientist, may use relatively little software eng, but a experimental computer scientist may use quite a lot. In that sense computer science is as much math as physics is, but it's something else too, since experimental computer science is concerned very heavily with how you actually store the information everything that comes with that.
There's also a lot of very real research in software engineering processes as done by computer scientists, the big area at my school that I'm aware of (University of Western Ontario) is in automated software testing and performance analysis. Software engineering is a very real field, but until you try and build software involving dozens of people (not all of whom are programmers), and then try and keep it updated and maintained over many years, it's hard to appreciate how there's science there, but there can be quite a lot.
Computer scientists *can* be programmers, they *can* be system operators or administrators, or something else, and or all practical purposes they have to be minimally skilled in programming and system operation. Please don't confuse job training with academic training. We aim to empower students to learn effectively and give them the skills and knowledge they need to be prepared for a general area (computing), what they choose to do with that is up to them. Some, well, the vast majority, will end up programming or
I'm a biology prof and have been around universities all my life. (Really. My mother was a university prof too.) There are a lot of misconceptions about what goes in to good teaching. In computer science, a sophomore may well be a better teacher than a 40 year-old full professor.
Professors are not rewarded for good teaching. We're rewarded mainly for bringing in grant funds. So getting good teachers depends pretty much on the luck of the draw, unless you're up at Stanford or Harvard levels. Community colleges often have better teachers than 4-year schools because they have much more focus on teaching.
The main thing you're paying $20,000/yr for is the higher class union card. A better name school is a ticket to a better-paying job. Which means, in terms of bang for the buck, a student is best off going to community college for the first two years, and then transferring to as flagship a school as they can manage.
As for actually learning something, well, that's a different matter entirely...