Unicode in the Curriculum?

[Phillips, Addison]

> 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
>