gEDA-dev: Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

[Peter Clifton]

On Sat, 2007-10-13 at 23:59 -0400, al davis wrote:
> On Monday 08 October 2007, Stephen Williams wrote:
> >  I think we are particularly
> > keen on this as we in gEDA feel there is a dumbing down of
> > the CS/EE curriculum by the big tool vendors.
> 
> It's tempting to think of the "big tool vendors" in our case as 
> Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor.  They are not the problem.
> 
> Well ... they might be a little because some professors insist 
> on teaching it even though it is way to hard to use for 
> beginners.
> 
> The biggest dumbing down is by accepting the MS-windoze way of 
> doing things, which you can do on any system.  Typing a command 
> is completely foreign, even if the command is only two letters.  

A different end of the spectrum... circuit simulation for children.
http://gcompris.net/en-electric

Worryingly, I can see the similarities to some serious commercial
packages ;)

Some GUI integration is a good thing, it reduces the learning curve, but
for higher education, there is no excuse to hide the netlists and engine
away. Make tools to navigate them from the schematic, or make day-to-day
tasks easier.

An Autocad like command entry might be good here... GUI commands are
mirrored in a text command entry which lets you know what the real
underlying action to the engine is. At many points you have the option
to click a point, or type coords / options etc..

Peter