Holistic Software Engineering Education Based on a Humanitarian Open Source Project

Abstract

For the past year, Trinity College has utilized Sahana, a free and open source disaster management system, as a foundation to teach software engineering. The goals of the use of the Sahana project are threefold: to provide students with a real-world software engineering experience; to introduce students to the open-source development model; and to attract a wider variety of students into computing due to the real-world and humanitarian nature of the Sahana project. This paper discusses an approach for using open source software as a foundation to teach software engineering in a Liberal Arts environment by involving students in an ongoing, real-world project from the very beginning, allowing students with a wide range of backgrounds to participate. Results of a learning survey of a small group of students who have participated in the project are presented. The paper also provides guidance to others contemplating incorporating open source projects into their software engineering courses or curriculum.

Open source contribution as an effective software engineering class project

“…They have incorporated open source development both into an introductory level class [5] and a software engineering course [2]. These projects were designed to engage students in service-learning and heavily emphasized the design and implementation phases of the development model, but engaged students in all phases of software production.…”

A Multi-Institutional Study of Learning via Student Involvement in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Projects

“…Student learning in HFOSS has the same problems inherent in student involvement in FOSS [28], however the humanitarian nature of the projects has been shown to motivate students [2,20,34]. The Humanitarian FOSS effort [31] was founded in 2006 [13][14][15][16] and more formal studies of student opinion of motivation and learning resulting from participation in an HFOSS project began in 2009 [12]. Results of an initial study into the impact of student participation in HFOSS projects indicate students feel that they gain software engineering knowledge ranging from tools and techniques to software process to understanding the impact of project size and complexity [10].…”

Project selection for student involvement in humanitarian FOSS

“…Determining the key project attributes that herald successful student involvement and those that potentially portend failure is critical to supporting student success. The presenters have overseen student participation in multiple HFOSS projects since 2006 [3][4][5][6][7][8] and have created a set of criteria and accompanying rubric for determining the applicability of projects for student involvement [1].…”