

On a weekend, I taught open source skills to CS kids. Thoughts? - asheeshlaroia
http://opensource.com/life/10/11/introducing-students-world-open-source-day-1

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RiderOfGiraffes
Fantastic job, and well done in taking real, practical and positive steps to
get people involved.

Giving people the underlying skills of git, bug trackers, _etc,_ means you're
giving them the chance to join in and learn the other things that they can
learn simply by participating in open source.

I do a similar thing in math, giving people the basics of proof techniques,
math notation, how to read math, _etc._ The kids can be amazingly responsive,
and it's incredibly rewarding.

Well done.

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tswicegood
I love this idea! In the PHP community we've started to have more and more
talks show up on the conference circuit about getting involved, but this is
even better. I bet in every major city there's people who would be interested
in getting involved in open-source who aren't going to go to a conference just
to find out, but they might spend a day or two some weekend doing just that.

I can't wait for the material for this to come out. It'd be great if it was on
GitHub or some similar service so we there's an open source way to get people
into open source.

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acgourley
Great idea - there are a lot of available programming cycles from students who
otherwise spend time on personal projects or games. And while that's of course
fine, it would be even better if they were contributing to FLOSS. Both for
FLOSS and for themselves.

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bengl3rt
This is great. Kudos to you. Let me know if you ever need help running
something similar in Boston.

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rick_2047
I tried to do something like this with IEEE student branch of my college (in
Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar or Mehesana, Gujarat, India). I could have got student
from all over the state with all the 13 SB in the section. But the problem is,
there is simply no speaker. Back in 2005, Indias first Drupal Bootcamp was
organized by our college, but after that no such event has taken place.

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burgerbrain
Nobody ever had to teach me these things, I taught them to myself because I
have a little thing called motivation. Do we really want all of these students
who couldn't even be irked to learn about something as simple and ubiquitous
as version control wasting everybodies time?

This sort of ignorance isn't even caused simply by a lack of interest in open
source. Without these very basic skills being covered by this, you're pretty
unhireable.

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paulgb
Giving up your weekend to learn to contribute to open source _does_ require
motivation. Whether you do it through instruction or self-study is a matter of
preference. That some people are not good enough to contribute to open source
because of their learning style is a poisonous attitude.

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burgerbrain
As I stated, this isn't an issue of learning how to contribute to open source.
The skills they are teaching here are required for any job in industry, open
or proprietary. And _yes_ it requires motivation, as I stated. These people
lack it.

>That some people are not good enough to contribute to open source because of
their learning style is a poisonous attitude.

You may not like it, but it's true. How can you expect someone who can't learn
on their own to understand your codebase enough to make meaningful
contributions?

The most important skill you can have is knowing how to teach yourself new
skills. If you don't have that, there is a very real, and very low, limit to
what you can realisticly contribute. This applies both to the industry in
general, not just open source.

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mquander
Dude, they're in school. Do you complain to their computer science teachers,
because self-motivated students should be able to learn CS themselves? It may
be true, but that doesn't mean that the teachers or students are doing
something wrong!

As for the ability to learn on their own, perhaps they are spending their own
time learning interesting things rather than learning shell scripting or how
to use git.

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burgerbrain
Learning computer science is not about learning version control systems, or
even programming. Computer science educations should focus on the theoretics
and math behind all of that.

Teaching version control to computer science students is like teaching
calculators to mathematics majors.

~~~
danio
The problem with teaching CS like that is that there is a huge disconnect when
joining the workforce.

Most employers expect a CS graduate to understand version control, bug
tracking systems, IDEs and the like.

Most CS departments think that such things are beneath them.

The concept of a weekend extra-curricular course to bridge the gap seems ideal
to me. The only problem I see is funding it.

