[math4] Teaching open source at RIT

[David Farning]

Well, it looks like the RIT team survived it's first release.  Go, RIT, Go!

Over the past couple of days there have been a couple of posts by
individuals involved in a teaching open source project at the
Rochester Institute of Technology.

By way of background....

Last spring, Prof. Steve Jacobs taught a course on open source
development.  Over the summer, Fred Gross mentored three students
through a Co-op program.  Last week, Community members, Karlie Robison
and Fred Gross lead team on a week long minicamp in Boston.

Looking forward....

The fall term at RIT is going to start in a few weeks and we are in
for another iteration;  Class, Co-op, MiniCamp.  As we push forward
with this process, I would appreciate it if we could use TOS as a
place to do our project coordination.  The big gain the RIT team can
bring to TOS is a example of fledgling open source class that has been
that has an active instructor, community members, and former students
who can share their successes and failures.  The TOS community can
help us as we work to make the next class awesome.

Challenges....

The two biggest challenges I noticed over the last iteration were:
1. The importance of _synchronising_ expectations.
2. Bringing a group of students up to speed with the culture, work
flows, and process of open source development in 10 weeks.

Concrete Tasks....

Moving forward, the most useful contribution we can make to the class
is to work with Prof. Jacobs on labs which help students learn to use
open source tools and methodologies.

david