Student's enrollment
Roman Prykhodchenko
I am a lecturer at Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics
and I have a proposal for you.
My students have to make their science projects during this half-year.
I would like to involve some of them in Trac to give them an
opportunity to work on a real project instead of writing their own
equation solvers or any other useless apps.
Here is my vision of such collaboration:
- I ask students who would like to work on Trac project and we choose
one
- You select the supervisor for the student. The supervisor will be
the student's "boss" and will give him tasks and help in solving
complex problems.
- The project should take student two-three months of time and you can
decide can be developed by student during this term.
- The student discusses tasks the supervisor and agrees them with me.
- When the tasks are agreed the student begins working on them and
writing his Project report.
- During the term I coordinate the student and solve organization
problems.
- When the term is finished the student should complete all tasks,
agreed on the beginning of the term and also the student should finish
his Project report.
- The student can continue working with you after the science project
is finished, if he likes it.
There some big advantages in such collaboration for all participants:
- You get a contributor that is interested in working on your project.
- The student gets the experience in working on a real project.
- If Trac is interested to student he will continue working on it
after the science project is finished.
I will not require any payments for the student.
Please consider my proposal and tell me what do you think about such
collaboration.
You can contact me by e-mail, Google talk: rprikho...@gmail.com or
Skype: rprykhodchenko
Sincerely,
Roman Prykhodchenko
Christian Boos
On 2/15/2011 12:09 PM, Roman Prykhodchenko wrote:
> (snip)
> There some big advantages in such collaboration for all participants:
> - You get a contributor that is interested in working on your project.
> - The student gets the experience in working on a real project.
> - If Trac is interested to student he will continue working on it
> after the science project is finished.
Well, I'm not really convinced. Working on a project like Trac means you
have a genuine interest in moving it forward, mainly because you're
using the software, and care for it. Getting a good mark is certainly
some kind of motivation, but perhaps not the fittest. Now if the student
himself knows and is interested in Trac, maybe. But then...
> I will not require any payments for the student.
!!!
The fact that you even raise this point is troublesome at best. We're
all volunteers here, and don't make any money by working on Trac. I may
be wrong but it seems to me you're not very familiar with how open
source projects work.
What IMO would be a better alternative approach to what you proposed is
that you and your students could *use* the Trac software for managing
the software projects of your students, that you would then *adapt* it
to your needs or add some features (if you don't know where to start,
there are lots of ideas you could find on trac.edgewall.org, eventually
starting with the "bitesized" tickets), and if successful, contribute
back what you did. This doesn't prevent any kind of collaboration
between more seasoned Trac developers and your student(s), like we try
to do for any other contributors (as time and interest permit).
-- Christian
Roman Prykhodchenko
On Feb 15, 2011, at 1:52 PM, Christian Boos wrote:
> Hello Roman,
>
> On 2/15/2011 12:09 PM, Roman Prykhodchenko wrote:
>> (snip)
>> There some big advantages in such collaboration for all participants:
>> - You get a contributor that is interested in working on your project.
>> - The student gets the experience in working on a real project.
>> - If Trac is interested to student he will continue working on it
>> after the science project is finished.
>
> Well, I'm not really convinced. Working on a project like Trac means you have a genuine interest in moving it forward, mainly because you're using the software, and care for it. Getting a good mark is certainly some kind of motivation, but perhaps not the fittest. Now if the student himself knows and is interested in Trac, maybe. But then...
Getting good mark is a good motivation of course but not the only one. I'm going to show them some projects and every of them will chose one project that is interested to him or her.
Students already know what the project tracker is and what tasks it allows to solve so there can be one who would like to work on some project tracker. I will give students a chance to work on a specific project only if it is interesting for him.
>
>> I will not require any payments for the student.
>
> !!!
>
> The fact that you even raise this point is troublesome at best. We're all volunteers here, and don't make any money by working on Trac. I may be wrong but it seems to me you're not very familiar with how open source projects work.
>
I understand that Trac is built by volunteers as well as I understand the importance of the opensource community. My idea is to give students the opportunity to become the part of the community to understand why does this community exist and why it is very important to bring own contribution to it. I wrote about payment to make you sure that the students know that all projects they will be working on are developed by the community for free.
> What IMO would be a better alternative approach to what you proposed is that you and your students could *use* the Trac software for managing the software projects of your students, that you would then *adapt* it to your needs or add some features (if you don't know where to start, there are lots of ideas you could find on trac.edgewall.org, eventually starting with the "bitesized" tickets), and if successful, contribute back what you did. This doesn't prevent any kind of collaboration between more seasoned Trac developers and your student(s), like we try to do for any other contributors (as time and interest permit).
>
> -- Christian
>
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>
- Roman
Dirk Stöcker
> Getting good mark is a good motivation of course but not the only one.
> I'm going to show them some projects and every of them will chose one
> project that is interested to him or her. Students already know what the
> project tracker is and what tasks it allows to solve so there can be one
> who would like to work on some project tracker. I will give students a
> chance to work on a specific project only if it is interesting for him.
Actually contrary to Christian I think this method is useful (having been
working myself a while at the university I probably understand the idea
behind better). It is much like the idea of Googles summer of code.
From my view it is important, that:
a) You are aware that the mentoring from the project side can be at
minimum and also may fail at each point of time (volunteers :-), but
usually OpenSource-projects are helpful for willing persons.
b) The academic stuff must be on your side.
I invite you to have a look at http://josm.openstreetmap.org/ (The Java
editor for openstreetmap), we always favor people implementing nice new
features in the core software or as plugin.
Ciao
--
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)
Roman Prykhodchenko
Thank you for http://josm.openstreetmap.org/ project. Of course academic staff will be on my side because I am a lecturer and that's my job :)
I also agree that mentoring from the project side can fail but the student needs it mostly in the beginning to make an initial dive to the project.
So I ask you if someone (Christian, Dirk or someone else) can supervise a student?
Dirk, it also would be great if you forward my appeal to openstreetmap project because I am sure it will be interesting for students.
- Roman
Dirk Stöcker
> Thank you for http://josm.openstreetmap.org/ project. Of course academic staff will be on my side because I am a lecturer and that's my job :)
Stuff, not staff. I mean all the tasks related to handling students must
be on your side ;-)
> So I ask you if someone (Christian, Dirk or someone else) can supervise a student?
I myself can't do so for Trac.
> Dirk, it also would be great if you forward my appeal to openstreetmap
> project because I am sure it will be interesting for students.
Although I'm admin of one major part, I stopped doing paperwork and thus
I'm not present at the relevant mailinglists. :-)
I suggest following:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
For JOSM:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/josm-dev
Roman Prykhodchenko
On Feb 15, 2011, at 8:54 PM, Dirk Stöcker wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Feb 2011, Roman Prykhodchenko wrote:
>
>> Thank you for http://josm.openstreetmap.org/ project. Of course academic staff will be on my side because I am a lecturer and that's my job :)
>
> Stuff, not staff. I mean all the tasks related to handling students must be on your side ;-)
Sorry I always use wrong word :) Of course I mend stuff.
>
>> So I ask you if someone (Christian, Dirk or someone else) can supervise a student?
>
> I myself can't do so for Trac.
That's great. I will contact you directly to discuss things in details
>
>> Dirk, it also would be great if you forward my appeal to openstreetmap project because I am sure it will be interesting for students.
>
> Although I'm admin of one major part, I stopped doing paperwork and thus I'm not present at the relevant mailinglists. :-)
>
> I suggest following:
>
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
> For JOSM:
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/josm-dev
>
> Ciao
> --
> http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)
>
Pavel Petrochenko
Sorry for interfering (I am not even Trac developer), but your post touched me quite a bit, so I decided to go forward and post my opinion on this.
>I would like to involve some of them in Trac to give them an
>opportunity to work on a real project instead of writing their own
>equation solvers or any other useless apps.
really good developers are starting to work on them at the university. However most of junior developers that I saw were lacking even basic experience in
computer science(I do not mean ability to implement something relatively simple, but ability to think and solve not to trivial problems on subject domain).
How ever academics is probably one of just few places in student life where he is able to learn how to approach such kind of problems. Basically it is last place
where he has time to learn how to think(yes he may learn later, but it will be much slower learn from those real life projects where such problems are rare). So I do
not think that writing of equation solvers is useless, and I strongly advice you to provide good and really interesting academic related projects for your students.
P.S. I really like Trac but I think that participation in open source projects should not be part of education
Regards,
Pavel Petrochenko
Roman Prykhodchenko
Felix Schwarz
Am 15.02.2011 22:05, schrieb Pavel Petrochenko:
> P.S. I really like Trac but I think that participation in open
> source projects should not be part of education
Regardless of what you think of Roman's initiative I think that real
world programming *should* be part of any computer science program (I'm
saying this as a MSc Computer Science/professional developer/process
consultant) provided that there three objectives are met:
- test-driven development, working towards full code coverage
- writing good code (good names, short methods, short classes) which
is essentially self-documenting [1]
- learning to collaborate with customers/non-technical people when
requirements are unclear/change regularly and how to contain risk by
working incrementally/iteratively.
I've met far too many graduates who can solve complex theoretical
problems but are unable to write good code.
However, that's somehow off topic so probably we should discuss this
off-list if there is interest.
fs
[1] I'd like to argue that many professional developers don't write good
code too though.
Dirk Stöcker
> From my observations professional life of developer mostly consists from real life projects from the start more over most of persons who will become
> really good developers are starting to work on them at the university. However most of junior developers that I saw were lacking even basic experience in
> computer science(I do not mean ability to implement something relatively simple, but ability to think and solve not to trivial problems on subject domain).
>
> How ever academics is probably one of just few places in student life where he is able to learn how to approach such kind of problems. Basically it is last place
> where he has time to learn how to think(yes he may learn later, but it will be much slower learn from those real life projects where such problems are rare).� So I do
> not think that writing of equation solvers is useless, and I strongly advice you to provide good and really interesting academic related projects for your students.
New personal in our company coming fresh from the university usually lack
experience. Not only in coding, but also in ways of bug tracking and
fixing as well in social skills related to group work and especially
collaborative software development. All of these are essential and all can
be trained in opensource projects.
Christian Boos
> Hi Pavel,
>
> My task as a lecturer is to teach students to work with an existing
> software, to make changes to it and to integrate with it.
> Students can learn algorithms, patterns and approaches when they
> attend other courses. It is not a target to teach students to write
> their own new software.
My initial mixed reaction was mainly because I was a bit taken aback by
your statement "I will not require payment for my students" (which
sounded, to me at least, like you were in position to require it!). So
let's get over this communication issue.
>
> In my opinion opensource projects are good for students because they
> have their communities that can help student to dive into the project.
>
Indeed. So let's be open to this initiative and see how it works out. I
suggest that once you selected a student, (s)he could send an
introduction mail to Trac-dev and from that point, one of us could
volunteer to mentor him or her.
We could then follow some of the guidelines set by the GSoC:
- http://www.booki.cc/gsoc-mentoring/_v/1.0/what-makes-a-good-mentor/
- http://www.booki.cc/gsocstudentguide/_v/1.0/making-first-contact/
-- Christian
Roman Prykhodchenko
After I talked to the students I found that there are several students that would like to work on Trac.
As I understand there are several people that can become mentors -- Dirk Stöcker and Felix Schwarz. Can you guys please give me your email addresses I can use to contact you personally? You can send them to rprikho...@gmail.com.
If someone else would like to be a mentor please let me know.
---
Roman Prykhodchenko
Bogdan Stanciu
I think you eventually took the right decision! And thank you for the
links, they are interesting to many!
have a nice day!
bogdan