Introducing Students To the World of Open Source

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."

Comments

This has always been one of my gripes

[SirGeek]

I've been a professional software developer for over 20 years and this is one area that I really think would benefit the REAL world so much.

I would also love to see a 2 semester class where 1 semester is where they learn how to write software specifications for fictitious business software package.

Then the 2nd semester is where it has to be implemented by a different group of students.

Re:This has always been one of my gripes

[wrook]

I once saw a "performace art" exhibit at the National Gallery in Ottawa Canada. They had an exhibit where an artist wrote up requirements for a piece of artwork on a series of index cards. He then handed the cards over to his students and asked them to create the art. There was a wonderful letter in the exhibition where the artist describes how the resultant piece of art was absolutely horrible and that his students must have been complete morons. Apparently when given a list of requirements the students turned off every rational thought in their heads and implemented only what was written down, giving no thought to whether it was a good idea or not. It was also interesting to see that the original artist accepted no responsibility for supplying requirements that, when implemented, resulted in horrible art.

This was done in the 1960s. I often think that programmers should be required to see that exhibit. I wish I could remember the name of the artist.

Re:In my experiance...

[cheekyjohnson]

I came to the same conclusion. What's worse is that the class I was in was a Visual Basic class. Most of them didn't care about programming, the ones who did performed very poorly at it (and in Visual Basic no less), and the teacher didn't even know what a function was (sure, he is a math teacher, but he had been teaching that class for three years). Disturbing.

Figure it out later

[cforciea]

Not to diminish the complexity of version control or anything, but I'd rather have a programmer that knows how to design an algorithm and needs help getting it checked in than a lousy programmer who knows his way around SVN well enough to check in his crap code.

Of course there are people with CS degrees that can't design an algorithm and vice-versa, but they are really trying to teach the more important part of the equation. If you can figure out the core theory behind computer, I'm confident that you'll be able to eventually navigate the software development process; I'm not sure the reverse is always true.

Re:In my experiance...

[SplinterOfChaos]

Many of the CS teachers i've met have told me they don't like the language or principles they're being payed to teach. I learned C++ with a teacher who thought C++ wasn't a good language, C being worse, and thought the class should be taught with Java. Now i have a Java teacher who dislikes object oriented programming and Java. I even once had a teacher for Computer Organization and Assembly Language who was just called in to do that class. He was barely (if at all) a teacher.

Feels like the school industry treats IT like much of what i've heard of the corporate world: Make it work; we don't care how.