Hi Howard, Designing an intro course around FOSS sounds interesting, and encouraging students to use & get involved with a FOSS project sounds promising. As you know, foss2serve.org and teachingopensource.org list learning activities, some of which might be useful in this context.
Consider introducing a variety of FOSS projects, and see which students connect with. Some CS students are really into games, but others aren’t, and might even be turned off by a focus on games. Humanitarian FOSS might appeal to students who want to make the world a better place. You could also use projects that students are likely to use for other reasons – FreeMind for note-taking, MuseScore for music notation, InkScape for drawing, etc. William Kinghorn recommended FLOSSmanuals, which I’ve explored a little bit. It looks interesting, and could be a good way to help students write & revise user documentation for a FOSS project. Clif --- Clif Kussmaul <mailto:c...@kussmaul.org> c...@kussmaul.org <http://kussmaul.org/> http://kussmaul.org +1-484-893-0255 EDT=GMT-5 (he/him) From: Francis, Howard [mailto:fran...@upike.edu] Sent: Friday, May 10, 2019 7:15 PM To: Clif Kussmaul <clifkussm...@gmail.com> Cc: tos@teachingopensource.org Subject: Re: [TOS] any interest in activities to introduce FOSS projects? Hi, Sorry I’m late to this (finals week hit me hard). I am very interested in following/participating in this. I am thinking about designing my CS 109 around open-source software. The opportunities for my freshmen to real computer science in their first semester seem to great to not do this. I’m hoping that they can latch on to one this fall, then continue to be a part of it to the point they can be making coding contributions in their senior project class. So discussing ideas to get student introduced to FOSS projects will be very useful to me. I would like to start the first class meeting by just having them play some open source games based on games familiar to them. Then take them to the decimation/wiki page for the game and have them review the getting started directions and see if they could make any recommendations to improve it. Finally I would let them know that they actually have the power to change it. One of my course learning goals is going to be “improve the documentation for an open-source program”. (And yes, I think I can get my IT department to install some open source games on the computers in our classrooms!) Looking forward to what other ideas we come up with. Howard Mr. Howard V Francis Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Faculty Athletics Representative University of Pikeville Pikeville, Kentucky to schedule a meeting with me, use: http://hvfrancis.youcanbook.me 606.218.5465 On Apr 27, 2019, at 12:32 PM, Clif Kussmaul <clifkussm...@gmail.com <mailto:clifkussm...@gmail.com> > wrote: Hi everyone, A year or so ago, I went to a library open house where students and faculty demoed FOSS tools like Audacity, FreeMind, Inkscape, GIMP, & WordPress. However, no one I talked to had participated in their project’s community. This seems like a missed opportunity, especially for someone who uses one project heavily (e.g. a musician who uses MuseScore, a designer who uses InkScape). Thus, I’d like to develop some activities to help non-technical people learn more about a specific FOSS project, and how to access it’s online resources and interact with the community. I plan to start with Audacity & MuseScore. Please let me know if you have other project suggestions, or would like to work together on such activities. My hope is that after the first few we can create a template to make it easier to do more. Clif --- Clif Kussmaul c...@kussmaul.org <mailto:c...@kussmaul.org> http://kussmaul.org <http://kussmaul.org/> +1-484-893-0255 EDT=GMT-5 (he/him) _______________________________________________ tos mailing list <mailto:tos@teachingopensource.org> tos@teachingopensource.org
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