FeetWetCoding: Trying to make learning C++ a little more fun!

[Robert Holder]

On 8/22/2012 8:24 AM, Tomaz Canabrava wrote:
> 2012/8/22 Robert Holder <robert at feetwetcoding.com>:
>> Thanks Tomaz for taking a look at it, and for your comments!
>>
>> Where you say "try to move your app to KDE-Edu", I'm afraid I don't really
>> understand what that entails.  Maybe I should explain how I got to this
>> list.  I met Alexandra Weisse at Qt Dev Days last year, and described our
>> project to her, and she suggested I might come here and mention my project,
>> since you guys are involved in educational software.  However I didn't want
>> to mention our project here while it was in such bad shape--if you think it
>> is confusing now, you should have seen it before!  :-D
> by "Move your project to KDE-Edu" I mean move the project to KDE's
> infrastructure, with a release schedule of 6 months per version, in
> the scieitific educational apps.
ah ok I see, thank you.
>
>> So, I'm a little embarrassed to have to admit that I don't really understand
>> KDE-Edu very well, in terms of how apps are structured here.
> We have apps for pre-school, school, college and university. your fits
> in college and university =)
yes this is our view also.  Sorry I was talking about the 
infrastructural part of it, that you referred to earlier,  I understand 
what you meant now.

>
>> Also, we have
>> only done straight Qt development, and have not used the KDE libraries
>> before.  Finally, one of our priority goals is to try to make FeetWetCoding
>> run on every platform: Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, which the Qt SDK allows
>> us to do. KDE would limit us to Linux only, although ensuring that our
>> project runs well on Linux is definitely a priority for us.
> Wrong assumption, KDE runs well on OS X and Windows too, it's not a
> linux-only project. how can we state that we love freedom if we limit
> one to just one platform? =), Besides that, KDElibs can be tough as a
> layer on top of Qt.
cool, I didn't know that!  Good info.
>> We also get the sense that our project is confusing for people who are
>> trying to get into it, and we've tried to make the documentation as complete
>> as we can, but that sort of ends up being even more overwhelming!  We're not
>> really sure how to fix it... neither of us are technical writers by trade!
> Me neither, but for example, I know from your fist page that your app
> is to help learning C++, then I read the tutorials and I didn't see
> the usage of your app, but QtCreator. maybe what's complex to
> understand in your app is that you use it to test the app done in
> another IDE, *maybe* if it was everything-integrated, it could look
> less confusing ( eg, by compilling and running the app at runtime,
> instead of asking the user to do the app in QtCreator / another IDE,
> and *then* launching your app to try. ), do less, learn more.
Ah, OK I see what you mean.  In our case, the learning environment *is* 
the IDE.  That is intentional.  IDEs like Qt Creator are what many 
professional software developers use, and one of our design goals is to 
try to help the beginning programmer get comfortable with using an IDE 
from the beginning.  This is actually a controversial subject, and there 
are many people out there who believe the opposite is a better idea: 
that throwing an IDE at beginners is just too overwhelming.  We may be 
wrong, and they may be right!  :-)  However there are already online 
tutorials for learning C++ from the command line (i.e. *not* IDE-based) 
and part of what we wanted to accomplish was to provide a learning 
solution that *is* IDE-based--to try to address a need that we believe 
has not yet been met elsewhere.

In any case, this is the design path we have chosen, and it is integral 
to our whole project, and teaching syllabus.  Redesigning our executable 
as you describe essentially means we would be writing an IDE ourselves, 
and there is already a perfectly good IDE available--Qt Creator!  :-)
>
>> :-(  We'd be happy to hear any specific observations you might have about
>> what was confusing for you if you have time.  We've been so close to this
>> code and documentation for so long that we can't really see it objectively
>> anymore!  :-)
>>
>> Thanks again very much for taking the time to look at our humble little
>> project!
> Best Regards,
> Tomaz Canabrava
>
Thanks again so much for you time, Tomaz!  Your feedback is very helpful 
and much appreciated.   We've been to a number of different venues, and 
even meetups with local teachers, a linux user group and so on, and 
nobody ever seems to know quite what to do with us.  :-) Particularly 
your comments on the IDE part being confusing, that is something 
important that we are going to have to think more about. Thanks!

Regards,
Robert