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Open Source in Education
Abstract
Today, schools across the country are making an effort to implement technology. Thiseffort is being hindered by issues of money, time, support and others. The author looks at Open Source and how it effects these issues. The paper begins with a history of OpenSource and then looks into its implications for education.
Timothy D. HartUniversity of MaineGarthwait/EDT 616May 7, 2003
 
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Introduction
This informal essay is designed to help educators better understand Open Sourcesoftware and what it means to schools using technology. While a completeunderstanding of Open Source is beyond the scope of this paper, you will gain enoughknowledge to get started. This paper is meant to be a primer for educators who arelooking for better and more efficient ways to use technology in schools.
Open Source!? I don’t even know what Source is?
Before we look at Open Source, we need to look at what source actually is. Anysoftware that runs on a computer is created using a programming language. Theselanguages were created by humans as a way to tell the computer what to do. Theseinstructions to the computer are known as a program’s ‘source’. Before the computer canrun these instructions, it has to compile the source code. Compiling is the process of turning a programming language into binary form (a string of 1s and 0s). Computersonly understand 1s and 0s because at their fundamental level, they are just electricalswitches that are either on (1) or off (0). This might seem like a restriction until you takein to account that modern computers can make millions and even billions of thesemanipulations in one second. Instead of communicating with the computer in binary, it ismany times easier to use a human created language and then translate (compile) it. C++,Java, and Python are all examples of different programming languages . A great resourcefor learning more about a program’s makeup is How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Allen Downey, Jeffery Elkner, and Chris Meyers. It is available online athttp://www.thinkpython.com. To give you an idea of what these languages look like,let’s look at a little bit of actual code. It is tradition for every new programmer to start
 
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with the ‘Hello World’ program. It is a simple program that simply writes the phrase“Hello World” to the screen. I have provided code for C++, Java, and Python to give youa look at the different ways the same issue can be addressed.Hello World ProgramCodeOutputC++ programming language#include <iostream>int main(){std::cout << “Hello World\n”;return 0;}Hello WorldHello World ProgramCodeOutputJava programming languageclass helloworld{public static void main(String args[ ]){System.out.println("Hello World");}}HelloWorldHello World ProgramCodeOutputPython programminglanguage print “Hello World”Hello WorldAs you can see, this simple task of printing the words “Hello World” to the screencan be done many different ways. There are many programming languages out there,which all have their strengths, weaknesses, and purposes. However, they all are designedto do one thing, take your directions and turn them into a form the computer understands.To better appreciate how complicated and unreadable binary is, just look at a simple binary-word translation. The phrase “Hello World,” in binary is“0100100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000101011101101111011100100110110001100100.” As you can see, this is not something that anyone can read, letalone write anything as complicated as a program. Now that you have a better 
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