Re: Unicode in the Curriculum?

Good question and interesting responses so far. I've taken the
opportunity to expand on it quickly in the hopes of eliciting some
information from Africa. See
http://niamey.blogspot.com/2015/12/unicode-in-african-computer-science.html

Note mention of the Hausa and Fulfulde apps developed by computer
science students at American University of Nigeria. It may be that
Unicode figures in the curriculum there.

Don Osborn

On 12/30/2015 11:45 AM, Phillips, Addison wrote:
>> A few months ago I asked a class of 140+ first year Computer Science
>> programme and Joint programme students -
>>
>> Who has heard of Unicode?
> I do a similar survey whenever I teach the remedial I18N and Unicode classes at Amazon. When I ask if software developers *ever* received any formal education on internationalization or on character encodings, results are almost universally negative--more like zero percent than 20%. Which is one reason why we have to spend a significant amount of effort maintaining a training and education program.
>
> I suspect I'm not alone in the industry in thinking that educational establishments could do a better job of preparing developers with at least the basics of Unicode, character encodings, and internationalization.
>
> Addison Phillips
> Principal SDE, I18N Architect (Amazon)
> Chair (W3C I18N WG)
>
> Internationalization is not a feature.
> It is an architecture.
>
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces_at_unicode.org] On Behalf Of Andre
>> Schappo
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2015 8:16 AM
>> To: Unicode Public
>> Subject: Unicode in the Curriculum?
>>
>> A few months ago I asked a class of 140+ first year Computer Science
>> programme and Joint programme students -
>>
>> Who has heard of Unicode?
>>
>> about 20% of the students raised their hands.
>>
>> then I quickly followed it with the question
>>
>> …and who understands Unicode?
>>
>> Every single student whose hand was raised put it down.
>>
>> Some of these students were really experienced programmers, having
>> programmed from an early age.
>>
>> Many times over the years I have informally asked students studying in the
>> UK (1st, 2nd, 3rd year undergrad, MSc, PhD, home students, international
>> students) what they know of Unicode and the vast majority of the time they
>> know nothing or next to nothing.
>>
>> The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that the teaching of Unicode is not
>> on the curriculum of Schools, Colleges or Universities in the UK. IMHO, It
>> should be!
>>
>> I do wherever and whenever I can, incorporate Unicode in my teaching e.g.
>> recently I gave an introductory lecture on Regular Expressions and in my
>> examples I demonstrated, using Unicode text and patterns and not just ASCII.
>>
>> One such example I used was — /^人+鸭人+$/
>>
>> This regex is a reference to Hongkong and the visiting giant floating rubber
>> duck😄
>>
>> My regex examples also include Emoji and Egyptian Hieroglyphs😄
>>
>> Does anyone on this list teach Unicode at an Educational Establishment,
>> School, or College or University?
>>
>> André Schappo
>>
>
Received on Wed Dec 30 2015 - 13:32:10 CST