[TOS] cross-country capstone projects

Ralph Morelli ralph.morelli at trincoll.edu
Mon Dec 7 22:15:47 UTC 2009


Because of bounces, I'm reposting this -- sorry for any duplication.

Hi Greg,

Wow! What a great project -- UCOSP!  Any plans, down the road, to expand it
to non-capstone's?  That is, to let sophomores and juniors participate
through
independent study courses at their schools??

Also, if you're not already planning to attend, we'd like to invite you to
report on UCOSP at our HFOSS Symposium on "Buidling the HFOSS Community"
on March 10th in Milwaukee (http://www.hfoss.org/hfoss2010/).  I'll follow
up
off-thread!

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 6:17 AM, Greg Wilson <gvwilson at cs.utoronto.ca> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Asheesh Laroia's post about OpenHatch reminded me that I've been meaning
> to write as well.  Over the past year, we have been piloting a new program
> in which senior undergraduates from several different universities work
> together on open source projects.  Each student registers in a project
> course at his or her home institution; students are then put in teams of
> 4-6 that span several schools to get some hands-on experience with the
> working practices used in distributed teams.
>
> This term we had 45 students from 14 universities on 8 different projects
> ranging from geospatial database extensions and configuration tools for
> the Mozilla Thunderbird email client to soccer-playing robots:
> http://ucosp.wordpress.com/2009-fall has the complete list, along with a
> map of schools taking part.
>
> The students who took part have been posting their thoughts about what
> went well, and what didn't, on the blog (http://ucosp.wordpress.com).  I
> think it makes for interesting reading; in particular, it seems that the
> biggest issue students faced was getting started, and projects that gave
> them a handful of clearly-defined microtasks early on seemed to do better
> than ones that gave them more freedom right off the bat.
>
> If that's correct, then an aggregator for bite-sized starting points like
> the one Asheesh & friends have put together is going to help grow the
> community a lot by improving newcomers' chances of being successful early
> on.  I'd be interested in thoughts about how we could get more FLOSS
> projects to tag bugs for OpenHatch to pick up...
>
> Thanks,
> Greg
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