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-boun...@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
