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Introducing Students To the World of Open Source

Posted by Soulskill on from the what-do-you-mean-my-boss-doesn't-have-an-autograder dept.

paulproteus writes "Most computer science students never see a bug tracker, and very few learn about version control. Classes often don't teach the skills needed for participation. So I organized a weekend workshop at the University of Pennsylvania. Total newbies enthusiastically spent the day on IRC, learned git, built a project from source, and read bugs in real projects. I learned that there's no shortage of students that want to get involved."

6 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. UCOSP - Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Project by Vandilzer · · Score: 2, Informative

    What you have is great but you should check out: http://ucosp.ca/ and participate if you can.

    I am mentor with the program and work with a small group of students on a project. The student get to work for an entire semester on an open source project producing or contributing things of real value. On top of that they learn how to work in a distributed environment, which is essential these days. Really it is just amazing for the students.

  2. Re:Version control by Microlith · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is very true. Version control and the ability to diff against previous check-ins would have made finding some bugs (and avoiding others) much easier, had I known how to do it at the time.

    it would be really easy for professors to lock checking into their repo after the due date.

    Not even. You could just check out the last revision checked in on the due date. Subsequent revisions wouldn't even matter.

  3. Re:Version control by HogGeek · · Score: 3, Informative

    Honestly, I mis-read your statement to mean that there was a way to bypass the lock.

    I agree with your statement, but have no way of correcting the original post...

    Apology offered

  4. If you want to help run a similar event... by paulproteus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hey all! I'm going to be working on organizing more, similar events going forward.

    If you want to stay on top of that, or try to organize an event near you, join the mailing list for OpenHatch events: http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/events

    This is part of the OpenHatch project, an ongoing effort to help new contributors get involved in open source. If you want to stay in touch with OpenHatch, join us on #openhatch on irc.freenode.net or follow the links on our "About" page, http://openhatch.org/about/.

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  5. Yuvi Masory and Felice Ford played a huge role too by paulproteus · · Score: 2, Informative

    In my late-night Slashdot writing, I forgot to mention this the summary: Yuvi Masory and Felice Ford played a huge role in organizing the workshop. Yuvi and Felice handled all the logistics, getting all the details down to a T -- that included asking Github for sponsorship, staying up late the night before to organize the students into groups, reserving rooms, and earning the support of Penn computer science.

    The workshop was just a pipe dream until Yuri and Felice nailed down all the pieces. My hat's off to them!

    Further thanks go out to John Stumpo, Jonathan Simpson, and Zach Goldberg, who all came in from out-of-down to help these students get their feet wet in open source.

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  6. Re:In my experiance... by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Informative

    In high school, they don't have Computer science teachers (usually). They have a different teacher, who gets handed a text book on how to teach programming. They don't bother reading it, they probably teach language arts or Math - so they just kind of dole it out to the kids and try to help where they can.

    At least, thats been my experience. I didn't reach anyone with programming experience till Post secondary.