Sunday, November 27, 2011

FOSSEE updates

The FOSSEE project started in mid 2009 and has been doing fairly well.
We've conducted several Python and Scilab workshops all over India. We
organized two SciPy.in conferences (2009 and 2010) and hosted Sage days
25. This year we are organizing SciPy.in 2011 at IIT Bombay.

We've generated plenty of introductory material on elementary Python for
scientific computing, version control and using GNU/Linux tools. Using
this material we are conducting a "Software development techniques for
engineers and scientists" course at IITB. There are numerous other
initiatives including a textbook conversion project that we are working
on.

Recently, and rather significantly, we've have embarked on an ambitious
effort to train about 650 teachers all over India over five weekends
this month on "Software development techniques for engineers and
scientists". This is part of Prof. Phatak's IIT e-Outreach program
funded generously by the MHRD, India. More details are available here.

The basic idea is that we conduct workshops at IIT Bombay and the
lectures are streamed online. Students are able to interact with the
faculty via the internet. We are very excited about this since this
allows us to reach out to a large number of people in one shot. It is
also a tad scary since the numbers are so large. So far it has worked fairly well.

I did write a simple Django based application to take online exams and automatically
grade the submitted solutions and will probably talk about that in more detail
at a future point.

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