Partial Outline of New Version of Course

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I have put a mostly-complete draft of my ideas for a rewrite of the course online. This version would start with specific problems, then backfill the tools and skills needed to solve them, but there are some big outstanding issues:

1. There still isn't anything on the computational thinking skills that Jon Udell identified. I don't know how to tackle these without relying more than I want to on closed-source offerings like Yahoo! Pipes that could disappear at a moment's notice.
2. I just can't see how to fit some topics—particularly object-oriented programming and web programming—into the available space (a maximum of two hours of lecture and four hours of lab for each). What are the minimum useful problem/lecture for each?

There are a few others as well (just search for 'TODO'), but those are the big ones. Any help you can give would be very welcome.