Pepperdine University
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Founded in 1937, Pepperdine University is an independent, medium-sized christian university which currently enrolls approximately 7,700 students. Courses are taught in Malibu, California (at the University's 830-acre/3.4 km2 campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean), Washington, D.C. and at international campuses located in Germany, England, Italy, Switzerland, Argentina, and China. |
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The Challenge
Pepperdine University was looking for a platform to use in three of their required courses for computer science majors: Computer Science I & II, Computer Systems and Senior Capstone. Their most important requirement was to find a cross-platform solution. Not only was it of the utmost importance to avoid restricting their own students to only one platform, but cross-platform capability was also important because their applications are used by students at other universities. It is hard to restrict such a heterogeneous group to just one platform. It was essential that the tool had a GUI builder. Low cost and ease of use were also on the list of requirements.
The Solution
Pepperdine began to use Qt in all three of the required courses mentioned above.
Qt offered them the cross-platform capability necessary to insure that their applications could be used by students of Pepperdine as well as by students of other universities by not limiting them to one particular platform.
Being licensed under the LGPL, Qt can freely be used by the university in its courses.
Qt Creator with its GUI builder, along side with the quality of the Qt API and the extensive Qt documentation has made Qt development even easier for the students to learn.
Qt later came to play an even more important role at the university when they developed Pep/8, a virtual machine for writing machine language and assembly language programs. The Pep/8 software package, including the application itself along with its assembler and simulator, was specifically designed to be used in conjunction with the Computer Systems course's textbook (link to book) , in which the goal is to teach the fundamentals of the classic von Neumann machine.
The Value
Pepperdine found Qt to be optimally suited to their needs.
The APIs in effect turn the C++ language into a more useable and teachable programming language. Many of our graduates report that they have a competitive edge because they have learned a real, industrial-grade language.
- - Dr. Stan Warford, Professor and Coordinator of Computer Science at Pepperdine University
