[Tugindia] LaTeX in schools

[David Kastrup]

"Sridhar M.A." <mas at uomphysics.net> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 02:06:54PM +0530, LinuxLingam wrote:
>    > 
>    > and Sridhar, which school./college students do you mention, and where?
>    > 
> Dept. of Physics, Mysore University. Recently, I had been to another
> University where I introduced the facilities of TeX (basic) and friends
> and won over many youngsters. 
> 
> Our students, a majority of them from rural background, had there
> first exposure to computers at M.Sc. If it surprises anybody, that
> is the ground reality here. I would the percentage of `computer
> unawares' at 70. With that background, I _feel_ emacs+auctex would
> be a very steep curve to climb.

With the current graphical interfaces, not too bad.  However, the
system administrator should make sure that the default settings and
activated packages for a beginner are sensible (AUCTeX, RefTeX,
preview-latex enabled, configured for document autoparsing and
working together).  While just using what is there is made easy,
installing, configuring and activating the stuff is indeed a bit much
to demand.

>    > incidentally, KTexMaker2 has morphed into KILE, and the latest
>    > version of KILE is awesome. demoeing this software to students
>    > and those testing the TeX waters leads to higher success, in my
>    > experience
>
> I am impressed by kile. Any day, I am comfortable with vim.

Some interfaces are outgrown at some time.  Just make sure that the
pupils have available (and know about) a good selection of choices
where this is reasonable.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
UKTUG FAQ: <URL:http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html>