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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."

2 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. This has always been one of my gripes by SirGeek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    UPS Sucks
  2. Re:In my experiance... by cheekyjohnson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    Filthy, filthy copyrapists!