I'm a student at the University of South Florida who's frustrated with the educational environment in the Computer Science program. Right now, I'm taking Program Design. I should be learning how to organize my source code into functions and modules in order to make my programs readable and maintainable; instead, I'm learning about arrays and recursion in C. Next semester, I have to take Object-Oriented Design, which is taught through C++ (shudder.)Two years ago, I fell in love with programming, and I've been learning as much as I could since then. The prospect of taking another C++ class bores me almost to tears. For that reason, I thought I would start a programming club in order to meet similarly ambitious students, learn new languages, discuss software development topics, and work with other students developers. However, I'm beginning to realize that there may not be any other students who share my software development experience. It's not because of a lack of motivation but a lack of opportunity: I know of only one other programming class (Programming Languages) and no classes on real-world software development. Everybody else only has experience writing trivial scripts in C and C++.I've realized that if I want to work with other student software developers, I'm going to have to train them myself. Now, I'm planning to make the club a software development bootcamp, teaching members how to develop software with modern tools and languages. Obviously, starting an unofficial software development course is a monumental task with many possible approaches. My question to you, dear reader, is What's my plan of attack?Should Ilecture the club myself, trying to balance club work with homework?ask the CS faculty to teach on topics within their expertise which may be less than relevant to members?try to find a sympathetic, experienced developer inside or outside the school who can share my workload?show video lectures (from MIT OpenCourseWare, Google Tech Talks, etc)?hold hands-on programming workshops?assign homework?do something else?
How can I bootstrap a software development community at my school?
programming practices;computer science