I can tell you one thing for certain as a cloud computing solutions engineer working in the federal sector, these companies aren't offering this to the government as a free model. There's a hefty price tag.
C++, Java, etc., are still high-languages in my curriculum, at least. There's a core CS class here, Program and Data Representation, which through its coursework covers a great deal of Assembly as well as C.
Course Offering Brief: Introduces programs and data representation at the machine level. Data structuring techniques and the representation of data structures during program execution. Operations and control structures and their representation during program execution. Representations of numbers, arithmetic operations, arrays, records, recursion, hashing, stacks, queues, trees, graphs, and related concepts.
I'm in my second year of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. One of my current CS classes is Software Development, and our final project is something just along these lines. Until now we've developed smaller programs under the guidance of our professor, like a simple photoeditor (Rhocasa, based off Picasa) and coded our own filters and the GUI. Our final project is an open-ended design in teams of 2-4, developed over the course of 5 weeks. We are using CVS and though the class has used Java primarily, we can choose any other language for development, provided we have a reason to deviate from Java (my partner and I are developing a Google gadget in C#, for instance).
I feel a project like this should absolutely be a part of a CS curriculum. It teaches critical team development skills, how to take advantage of modularity, and really get to delve into something that interests your team personally. My professor has done a stunning job of making our design problem sets interesting and challenging -- I don't feel like it's been the typical software class where the assignments are mundane, and you don't feel as if you've accomplished much upon completion of the work. The course site can be seen at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/cs205.
Any professor who doesn't believe at least one course of a CS curriculum should include a design project like this from start to finish (not necessarily open-ended as mine) is putting their students at a big disadvantage, in my opinion.
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I can tell you one thing for certain as a cloud computing solutions engineer working in the federal sector, these companies aren't offering this to the government as a free model. There's a hefty price tag.
C++, Java, etc., are still high-languages in my curriculum, at least. There's a core CS class here, Program and Data Representation, which through its coursework covers a great deal of Assembly as well as C. Course Offering Brief: Introduces programs and data representation at the machine level. Data structuring techniques and the representation of data structures during program execution. Operations and control structures and their representation during program execution. Representations of numbers, arithmetic operations, arrays, records, recursion, hashing, stacks, queues, trees, graphs, and related concepts.
I'm in my second year of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. One of my current CS classes is Software Development, and our final project is something just along these lines. Until now we've developed smaller programs under the guidance of our professor, like a simple photoeditor (Rhocasa, based off Picasa) and coded our own filters and the GUI. Our final project is an open-ended design in teams of 2-4, developed over the course of 5 weeks. We are using CVS and though the class has used Java primarily, we can choose any other language for development, provided we have a reason to deviate from Java (my partner and I are developing a Google gadget in C#, for instance).
I feel a project like this should absolutely be a part of a CS curriculum. It teaches critical team development skills, how to take advantage of modularity, and really get to delve into something that interests your team personally. My professor has done a stunning job of making our design problem sets interesting and challenging -- I don't feel like it's been the typical software class where the assignments are mundane, and you don't feel as if you've accomplished much upon completion of the work. The course site can be seen at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/cs205.
Any professor who doesn't believe at least one course of a CS curriculum should include a design project like this from start to finish (not necessarily open-ended as mine) is putting their students at a big disadvantage, in my opinion.