Computer Science Course - Coding & Networking

[gazlee]

Hi everyone, next year we're going to be starting a computer science course and we've been approached by teachers with numerous requirements including access to many IDEs (like Visual Studio, Pycharm) for various programming languages (C, Python, Java, VB etc) as well as a requirement to be able to do some basic networking setup.

 

Currently we have VirtualBox available which we use to allow students to mess around with an expendable XP image, but that's about it, it doesn't have network access (the function is disabled).

 

Is anyone else doing anything similar? If so what software are you using and how do you keep security tight?

 

Cheers,

Gary

[computer_expert]

You can find a lengthy thread on this here, along with a load of other bits on locking down virtualbox.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/95325-virtualbox-image-programming-classes.html

[gazlee]

Thanks computer_expert, I've been having a look at this. I'm also interested in knowing what software people have been opting for inside the machines. We're being asked to deliver resources for a very broad range of programming languages in addition to some way of doing networking between machines.

[3s-gtech]

We have Python and Scratch on ours, as well as Visual Studio. We run Linux and Windows VMs for greater choice too, can help with flexibility.

[synaesthesia]

We concentrate on Python, and IDLE is used most, however we also provide Netbeans with various addons which covers all the major languages and Notepad++.

[mrbios]

Not sure if this will be of any help to anyone here but feel free to pass this on to your IT teachers: https://craigsargent.wordpress.com/

 

The guy that made that site is our head of IT, he's also part of some board for computing in education nationally, and i have to say he's probably the best teacher of any subject i've ever known.

[gazlee]

Thanks for all the responses so far. Has anyone had to deal with the exam board requiring evidence of students setting up a small network between VMs and installing hardware peripherals etc?