This poster presents an analysis of student learning of basic workflow process for GitHub. It draws on data gathered by GitKit, a learning environment that supports the development of fundamental GitHub skills widely used in contemporary software development. The poster discusses the purpose and facilities of GitKit and presents an analysis of data from use of GitKit at multiple institutions. This analysis focuses on student misconceptions and strategies in trying to execute basic GitHub workflows.

Open source provides a great approach for students to learn about large scale software, team processes, and tools that comprise professional software development. Open source can motivate learning in software engineering by providing scale, complexity, and product evolution that in-class examples cannot match. Finally, open source projects motivate students by providing an authentic, collaborative engagement environment for learning. Join us for a discussion with instructors on the myriad ways that open source software can be incorporated into classes or used to motivate students in clubs and extracurricular activities. Instructors who have tried open source with students will be invited to share their experience and offer examples of what they've done in the classroom. All participants will be encouraged to share ideas, discuss challenges and problems, and ask questions related to teaching with open source. Humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) provides the added benefits of appealing to students who are interested in humanitarian applications of computing and providing an opportunity to introduce all students to computing for social good. The BoF organizers are focused on HFOSS, and able to discuss that aspect of teaching open source. But the organizers also encourage faculty with interest in using any type of open source in the classroom to join in this discussion.

This poster presents new developments related to GitKit, a scaffolded environment that supports both students and instructors in developing fundamental skills related to Git-based platforms like GitHub that are widely used in contemporary software development. The poster discusses the purpose and facilities of GitKit, including new capabilities, and preliminary data collection to analyze student skill development in learning GitHub tasks.

This work in progress research paper describes preliminary results of a survey-based study with the goal of answering the research question: Are students in underrepresented race/ethnic groups more interested in and motivated by humanitarian applications of computing rather than non-humanitarian applications? The survey explores student interest and motivation by asking them to choose between humanitarian and non-humanitarian computing applications. The study builds on theories and prior studies that indicate that student learning is improved by providing context to learning in the form of authentic, collaborative engagement with the subject matter. The study also builds on prior research that indicates humanitarian applications may have special appeal to some student groups that are underrepresented in computing education. This prior work includes ad hoc observation by the authors and several small scale surveys that were administered to upper level computing students. Part of the motivation for this study was to see if the same preference for humanitarian applications was apparent with students taking introductory computing courses. Introductory computing students at four institutions completed the survey and the responses of 340 students were analyzed based upon their self-reported races/ethnicities. Students in all race/ethnic groups indicated a higher interest in and motivation by humanitarian applications over non-humanitarian options. In fact, all race/ethnic groups preferred humanitarian over non-humanitarian computing applications at the p<.001 level. In considering differences across race/ethnicities, results indicate that humanitarian applications of computing are particularly appealing to Black and Latinx students. In combination these results indicate that all student groups might be better engaged by course materials that provide a humanitarian context, and underrepresented Black and Latinx students might find the humanitarian connection particularly compelling. Based on these findings, instructors might consider framing programming examples and assignments with a humanitarian focus in order to engage students and potentially increase the number of underrepresented students studying computing.

Undergraduate computing students spend a great deal of time developing the programming skills needed to begin a professional career. Much of that learning centers on single programs that are no more than a few thousand lines of code. Many students have relatively few opportunities to explore and understand team-built industrial scale software products or to see how these projects and their processes are organized. This poster discusses two assignments that use open source projects to provide an opportunity for students to explore large projects and begin to understand some of the organizational elements that are typical of large software projects.

Would you like to incorporate open source into your classes? Open source provides an unmatched opportunity for students to learn about large scale software, team processes, and tools that comprise professional software development. Using open source is helpful in motivating many software engineering concepts by providing scale, complexity, and on-going product evolution that is difficult to mimic in classroom-only materials. Finally, open source projects motivate students by providing an authentic, collaborative engagement environment for learning. Join us for a discussion with instructors on the myriad ways that open source software can be incorporated into classes or used to motivate students in clubs and extracurricular activities. Experienced instructors will provide examples that they've used in the classroom. Participants will be encouraged to provide examples and/or ask questions.

This study investigated whether humanitarian applications of computing are more interesting and motivating to students than non-humanitarian options and whether there are differences across race/ethnic groups. A survey was developed to measure students' interest by asking them to choose between two applications, one humanitarian and one non-humanitarian. Students were also asked to rate how motivating they would find working on a collection of humanitarian and non-humanitarian applications.

The Computer Science Curricula 2023 (CS2023) effort includes a synergistic endeavor to provide supplemental material to aid in the adoption of the guidelines. This supplemental material takes the form of a series of peer-reviewed articles by experts on the design and delivery of Computer Science programs. The Computing for Social Good (CSG) committee is responsible for providing an international perspective on Computing for Social Good in Education (CSG-Ed), description of models for incorporating CSG into curricula, and a discussion of best practices including examples. There is a wide range of approaches to CSG-Ed both in the classroom and beyond. This BoF is intended to gain input from current instructors about these approaches including a discussion of which approaches work well and which are more problematic. We also intend for the BoF to bolster the community of educators who are interested in CSG-Ed in order to disseminate approaches to a wider audience.

The persistent lack of women in computing programs leads to some key questions about how to engage more women in computing. Although prior research has shown that women self-report they are motivated by the potential "doing good" nature of computing, this paper describes a more focused study designed to investigate if there are differences in women's interest and motivation in developing humanitarian vs. non-humanitarian applications.

This Research Full Paper describes a case study of educators changing practice as a result of interactions with an open source software community. It examines an NSF-funded initiative designed to expose educators to humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) communities and, in turn, to support them in involving their students in these communities as part of their classroom experience. To date, more than 150 faculty from over 120 different institutions have participated in the initiative’s faculty development workshops. In this work, we conducted in-depth interviews with 24 workshop participants. The interviews explored how faculty had adopted HFOSS in the classroom, the hurdles and successes they encountered, and how their teaching had changed, among other questions. Some of the themes we identify in our data – obstacles to adoption, such as a lack of time, and the importance of the institutional context – confirm prior findings in the literature on pedagogical change. However, this work also identifies several additional nuances that have not previously been reported and emphasizes common aspects among educators who successfully adopted a practice.

Instructors in computing live with constant change in our discipline along with evolution of teaching modes and methods. These changes lead many instructors to adjust their teaching and also seem to impact self-perception and identity of faculty as instructors. This BoF will discuss instructor identity in computing and ways that identity changes over time. The organizers have observed identity change among instructors who have begun to employ open source software for social good as a vehicle for student learning. The BoF is an invitation to discuss this identity change in a broader context. It seems likely, for example, that the pandemic may have changed instructor self-perceptions. The on-going high rate of change in computing may also impact instructors. The BoF ogranizers would like to discuss other instances of change in identity of computing faculty, and discuss how this phenomenon might be investigated. Faculty interested in an exploration of this area as a research project are particularly encouraged to join the BoF.

The benefits of increasing diversity in computing are well known, but the computing profession continues to struggle to become diverse. Recent figures from the National Center for Women in Technology show that only 26% of the computing workforce were women. There is some evidence that demonstrating the ability for computing to accomplish social good may make studying computing more attractive to women and members of other underrepresented groups. This poster presents initial results of a survey of 288 undergraduate students to ascertain preferences for computing domains. The poster provides evidence of aspects of computing that appeal to underrepresented groups, including women.

Engaging students in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) projects allows them to gain real-world software development skills while helping society. Participating in an existing HFOSS project, although ripe with learning opportunities, presents a number of hurdles for faculty and students. An alternative to joining an existing HFOSS project community is to participate in a faculty-led HFOSS project. These projects provide the instructor with more control over the learning environment, but often lack an active community outside of the classroom. This paper describes a multi-institutional effort to engage a community of developers in creating humanitarian open source projects to support their on-campus food pantries. Food insecurity on campus has become a national concern and many institutions have, or are starting, food pantries to support the student, staff, and faculty community. Starting a faculty-led HFOSS project involves making decisions not only about the features of the project but also about community norms, tool choices, project development workflow, and inter-institution cooperation. This paper provides an overview of the creation of LibreFoodPantry, a community who is developing a suite of projects that support on-campus food pantries. It describes instances of using LibreFoodPantry's projects in various classroom settings, the lessons learned from these experiences, and the resulting discussions and decisions made by the LibreFoodPantry Coordinating Committee. This process has led to a community dedicated to easing the on-ramp for faculty who want to help their students contribute to an HFOSS project.

Student involvement in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) increases student self-reported learning while providing the motivation of "doing good" [11]. Supporting this type of student participation also impacts the instructors. This effect includes modifying one's teaching approach, providing a different perspective on the subject matter, and changing how instructors perceive their roles. This paper explores the impact on instructors that result from supporting student participation in HFOSS, including consideration of pedagogical practices, self-perceptions of teaching, and exposure to open source culture and technologies. The paper also examines resources that instructors consider important for HFOSS education. The analysis presented here is based upon a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 24 faculty members. Results indicate that exploring HFOSS education changes instructors' pedagogical approaches, broadens instructors' perspectives on the connections between academic content and professional practice, and has impact on instructors' attitudes and motivations when teaching.

Studies have shown that Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects provide a rich learning environment for students, allowing them to gain a range of both technical and professional skills. Although there have been a number of studies on student attitudes toward learning within HFOSS projects, little has been documented about instructors' experiences supporting their students in the classroom. This paper examines survey results from 26 faculty members who participated in an NSF-funded Professors' Open Source Software Experience workshop with the goal of incorporating HFOSS into their curriculum. The survey was designed to identify barriers to using HFOSS in the classroom, to understand the type of classes where instructors incorporated HFOSS, the successes attained and challenges faced by instructors, and to understand instructors' future plans. The data gathered was used to enhance semi-structured interviews that are currently being analyzed. This paper focuses on the hurdles reported by faculty members, the cross-section of uses of HFOSS in the classroom as well as factors that may influence one's ability to integrate HFOSS into the curriculum. The results of the survey demonstrate that faculty have successfully incorporated HFOSS into a wide range of courses across all four years of the curriculum with both large and small classes. The major hurdles are time to prepare materials for one's course as well as finding time within an existing course to integrate HFOSS material.

This poster presents a plan for a first-semester freshman computing course based on Open Organization principles using humanitarian organizations as the context. The goal of the course is to instill engagement with learning in students from the beginning of their academic careers when they are psychologically invested in their learning and more likely to internalize the learning. The anticipated outcome is students who are motivated, engaged, and able to handle the rapid rate of computing change in today's society.

1. Many instructors are excited by the potential learning that occurs via student participation in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects. However, one of the main challenges for instructors desiring to support such participation is identifying an appropriate project. There are a vast number of HFOSS projects with varying sizes, complexities, domains and community cultures. This presentation describes a guided approach to evaluating an HFOSS project for someone trying to pick a project to which they will contribute. The activity is designed with particular attention to instructors who need to identify an HFOSS project that they will use in a class. The characteristics evaluated include the pattern of contributions, pattern of commits, programming languages used, and more. This activity uses OpenMRS as a sample project to evaluate.

There is a growing community of faculty members who support student participation in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects in a variety of courses at a range of different institutions. HFOSS can provide a plethora of learning opportunities for students that ranges from design to code to test to documentation and more. Involvement in an HFOSS project allows students to gain professional skills while also gaining an understanding of the social impact of computing. However, experience has shown that supporting student involvement in HFOSS can pose some challenges to instructors including identification of appropriate assignments, creation of rubrics, grading, and managing interactions with the HFOSS community. The organizers of this BoF are faculty members who have a spectrum of experience in supporting student involvement in HFOSS. The organizers will share tips for structuring such student participation as well as discuss challenges that they've experienced and approaches for overcoming those challenges. Attendees will be encouraged to ask questions about how to get started, selecting an appropriate HFOSS project, structuring assignments, and more. This BoF will provide faculty members the opportunity to network with instructors with experience in this area.

Student participation in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects offers great learning opportunities for students, including: designing, coding, testing, documentation, collaboration and other professional skills. Humanitarian projects also foster understanding of computing's potential social impact. However, working with any open source project -- including HFOSS projects - presents some challenges to instructors. Identifying appropriate assignments, creating meaningful rubrics, mapping the academic schedule to a project's release cycle, and eliciting engagement from the HFOSS project community are just a few of the potential hurdles to overcome. This BOF will be led by a diverse group of faculty who have encountered and overcome these challenges. The organizers and other attendees will share approaches to student involvement in HFOSS as well as the challenges they've encountered and how they've overcome them. Faculty who are interested in involving students in real-world projects will be able to ask about topics including use of HFOSS in a range of courses including introductory courses, project selection, structuring courses and assignments, and gaining university buy-in, while making connections with more experienced faculty in this area. Participation of an open source community member will add perspective from open source communities.

This paper reports on a study of student opinion of the impact of participation in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) on motivation, computing learning, and major/career direction. The study builds on an existing body of work in student participation in HFOSS. Six institutions with a variety of profiles are involved in the study and the paper reports on quantitative analysis of Likert survey items. Results of Mann-Whitney U tests on Likert data are mixed. Positive results indicate that students perceived that participating in an HFOSS project made them more comfortable with computing and improved their perceived ability to maintain a project and interact with professionals. Negative results include a perceived decrease in perception of computing skills, which may result from an increased understanding of the complexity of developing a large, real-world project.

Providing students with the professional, communication, and technical skills necessary to contribute to an ongoing software project is critical, yet often difficult in higher education. Involving student teams in real-world projects developed by professional software engineers for actual users is invaluable. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has emerged as an important approach to creating, managing, and distributing software products. Involvement in a FOSS project provides students with experience developing within a professional environment, with a professional community, and has the additional benefit that all communication and artifacts are publicly accessible. Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects benefit the human condition in some manner. They can range from disaster management to microfinance to election-monitoring applications. This article discusses the benefits and challenges of students participating in HFOSS projects within the context of undergraduate computing degree programs. This article reports on a 6-year study of students' self-reported attitudes and learning from participation in an HFOSS project. Results indicate that working on an HFOSS project increases interest in computing. In addition, students perceive that they are gaining experience in developing software in a distributed environment with the attendant skills of communication, distributed teamwork, and more.

Software engineering students need to understand the major phases of software development such as requirements elicitation, design, etc., as well as the documentation that supports these activities. Students also need to understand the critical need for excellent communication both within development teams as well as with customers, managers, and other stakeholders. Student participation in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects provides an opportunity for students to gain a range of software engineering knowledge and skills via interaction with software professionals. However, many FOSS projects have minimal or incomplete documentation and frequently the documentation that does exist lacks organization. This presentation demonstrates the use of IEEE standard-based document templates within a FOSS project to scaffold student learning.

Curriculum guidelines for both Computer Science and Software Engineering emphasize the need for student experience working on a sizeable, real-world project. This poster presents student experience in a Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) project that is jointly maintained by the GNOME Accessibility Team and three academic institutions. In this environment, students enjoy apprenticeship learning and learn directly from professionals within an active project. Results from a survey on student self-reported software engineering learning, attitude towards computing, and career plans are presented.

Have you ever wanted your students to contribute to or learn from a real-world software project that benefits society? Want some help getting started? Many students find involvement in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects engaging and motivating. As a first step, this workshop will introduce faculty to FOSS tools and culture. Through a virtual field trip into the world of HFOSS you will learn how to find a project, discern characteristics of a good project for student participation and understand how to use IRC, a communication tool used by FOSS developers. The use of version control to support project development will also be discussed. Along the way, you will learn how to support student learning in such projects. All topics will be covered at an introductory level. Participants will take away exercises that can be used in the classroom. Additionally, participants will have access to support in the creation of assignments or curriculum and their implementation from teachers experienced in supporting students in HFOSS participation. Additional information at: http://www.foss2serve.org/index.php/SIGCSE_2014_Workshop Laptop required.

Programming contests have been used at the high school level to motivate students to study computing and generate excitement about computing topics. However, little investigation has been done into whether the selection of programming language impacts success in such contests. This poster presents the results of an analysis of five years of high school contest results held at Western New England University. The analysis looks at the languages used by winning teams and number of submissions. Results appear to indicate that winning teams use Java and Python for programming languages while less successful teams use BASIC, VisualBasic and C++. Interestingly, the majority of teams used BASIC as their programming language. Another interesting result was that low performing teams tend to have a disproportionately large number of submissions.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has become an important segment of the computing industry and a source of innovation in software development. The open culture of FOSS projects where all project artifacts are accessible and communication is visible provides computing educators with an array of unique opportunities for student learning. However, FOSS projects can also present hurdles to instructors desiring to take advantage of these opportunities including the learning curve for FOSS culture, infrastructure and processes, difficulties in designing appropriate assignments, and more. This paper presents a model for faculty development based on experiences with prior academic and FOSS approaches to faculty development.

Student involvement in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) holds the potential to support a wide range software engineering education topics from requirements to design to testing and more. In addition, participation in a FOSS project exposes students to large, complex software projects and real-world development teams and environments like those that they will typically see after graduation. However, identifying a project appropriate for student involvement can be a difficult task. There are a huge number of possible FOSS projects with a wide range of sizes, complexity, and domains. The presenters of this workshop have developed an approach to FOSS project identification [1] which is based on several years of experience with student participation in FOSS projects. The approach is based on humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) as those projects have been shown to motivate students [2]. During the workshop, key criteria for evaluating a FOSS project will be presented, along with a rubric. This workshop will interactively walk participants through the process of identifying and evaluating a project appropriate for their classes based on the criteria and rubric.

Studies have shown that the "near peer" experience where students of various levels are jointly involved in co-learning activities can motivate students and support wide learning. This poster describes initial steps towards the development of a Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software project by a mixed team of students of various levels and from varying institutions.

Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects provide a real-world application with an approachable and welcoming community for both faculty and students. Many faculty members are excited by the prospect of their students contributing to HFOSS. They perceive it as an opportunity to engage students, regardless of race or gender, in projects that have societal impact. However trying something new in the classroom though can be daunting, and many barriers to entry exist. Locating an appropriate project, trying to figure out how to incorporate a dynamic, real-world project into the curriculum and learning how to interact with the project's community each present their own set of challenges. This BOF provides a gathering place for faculty who are interested in student participation in FOSS or HFOSS. The discussion will include an overview of an NSF-funded project, OpenFE. The goal of OpenFE is to develop faculty expertise in working with HFOSS projects and to develop curriculum materials that support faculty members in bringing this approach into their classrooms. The members of the OpenFE team will discuss plans for this grant and welcome both novices and experienced contributors to join us and provide feedback.

Participating in free and open source (FOSS) software communities provides students with authentic learning while supplying instructors with a wide variety of educational opportunities including coding, testing, documentation, professionalism and more. However, instructors may be unfamiliar with how FOSS communities work and therefore may be reluctant to involve students in such communities. This workshop is a subset of material used in Red Hat's Professors' Open Source Summer Experience (http://communityleadershipteam.org/posse) workshop, now in its third year of successfully providing a ramp to FOSS projects for instructors. These instructors have demonstrated success in involving their students in FOSS communities where students have contributed code, interface design, and more. Intended audience: Computing educators at the college or high school level interested in involving students in open source software projects in any capacity (testing, coding, documentation, design, project management, observational shadowing of a large-scale project, etc). The workshop may also be of interest to pre-high school computing educators and members of the open source community. No experience with open source communities or contribution is necessary.

Involving students from a wide range of backgrounds in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) project communities gets them a hands-on, portfolio-building experience in the creation of a real-world project while simultaneously building their institution's public profile. The Teaching Open Source (http://teachingopensource.org) community is an emergent (3 year old) group working on scaffolding to bridge the cultural differences between academic and FOSS communities of practice. Join us to share questions, challenges, and triumphs of incorporating FOSS participation into existing and new curricula as well support resources for doing so. Alumni and current members of the POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, http://communityleadershipteam.org/posse) will attend in mentorship roles. Faculty attendance at the SIGCSE 2010 BoF on Teaching Open Source (TOS) indicates that student involvement in FOSS projects is a teaching and learning approach of interest for many faculty members. The transparency of both artifacts and process make FOSS an attractive real-world experience that enhances peer learning and intrinsic motivation for a diversity of courses, from introductory, interdisciplinary, and non-major classes to software engineering core offerings and senior capstones. However, such student participation involves a significant learning curve and effort on the part of the faculty member, and support structures for faculty are still maturing. 2011-2012 marks the 3rd academic year the TOS community has explored this realm together, and the past year has seen the emergence of more best practices, support resources, and curricular material. Community members are starting to design cross-institutional research on the impact of FOSS participation on students. BoF attendees will be encouraged to ask questions, network, and take advantage of the TOS community as a support structure for their own courses and projects.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) offers a transparent development environment and community in which to involve students. Students can learn much about software development and professionalism by contributing to an on-going project. However, the number of FOSS projects is very large and there is a wide range of size, complexity, domains, and communities, making selection of an ideal project for students difficult. This paper addresses the need for guidance when selecting a FOSS project for student involvement by presenting an approach for FOSS project selection based on clearly identified criteria. The approach is based on several years of experience involving students in FOSS projects.

Participating in free and open source software (FOSS) has numerous benefits for students (and faculty), and there is increasing interest in encouraging such participation. There is a broad range of possible contributions to FOSS projects including documentation, testing, coding, and more. This range allows people with a variety of backgrounds, including little or no CS background, to contribute to a FOSS project. This poster describes the status of a project to identify and categorize learning activities that contribute to FOSS. During Spring 2011, an NSF-sponsored workshop on student participation in humanitarian FOSS for the SoftHum project brought together a group of experienced FOSS developers, faculty, and students. One result of this workshop was a list of nearly 100 learning activities that could contribute to FOSS projects and provide meaningful experiences for students and faculty. We were surprised by the variety of results. Some of the activities have been used successfully or are variations of familiar learning activities; others are ideas that seem promising but require further development and validation. We are experimenting with individual activities, and seeking colleagues interested in doing likewise. We are also mapping the learning activities onto Computer Science Curriculum 2008 to make it easier for faculty to identify relevant activities and map them to course or program learning objectives. The poster briefly summarizes relevant background, describe the process used to identify appropriate activities and provide examples of activities and their mappings.

Software projects are frequently used to provide software engineering students with an understanding of the complexities of real-world software development. Free and Open Source Software projects provide a unique opportunity for student learning as projects are open and accessible and students are able to interact with an established professional community. However, many faculty members have little or no experience participating in an open source software project. In addition, faculty members may be reluctant to approach student learning within such a project due to concerns over time requirements, learning curve, the unpredictability of working with a "live" community, and more. This paper provides guidance to instructors desiring to involve students in open source projects.

Many faculty members understand the potential for computing students to learn via participation in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. However, there are few resources for introducing students (and faculty members) to FOSS projects. This tip presents several "FOSS field trip" assignments that allow students to explore and learn about FOSS projects.

This poster reports on student opinion of the Software Engineering knowledge gained by students exploring a Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software project. Eight students in a non-majors class and eleven more-advanced software development students were surveyed pre- and post-course on their opinions of technical and professional knowledge gained.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and documentation projects provide excellent learning opportunities for students. In the context of active learning, FOSS is particularly interesting in providing transparent meritocracies that allow students to observe and contribute as part of their learning. This panel will present four different perspectives on student involvement in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. These perspectives will cover: (a) different ways that students can contribute to FOSS projects beyond coding, (b) an industry perspective on student involvement in FOSS projects, (c) how Humanitarian FOSS can provide a welcoming environment for student learning, and (d) barriers to faculty involvement and how such barriers can be overcome.

Student involvement in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects holds the potential to provide a rich education experience to undergraduates. This paper discusses educational use of HFOSS including identification of the potential for HFOSS to impact curricula, an overview of an implementation of HFOSS in education and a description of an evaluation framework that includes measures of success of such a program. The paper also presents results from initial surveys of students involved in HFOSS development in several U.S. academic institutions. The paper concludes with a discussion of work in progress.

No abstract available.

This panel will discuss issues and methods for incorporating free and open source software (FOSS) in computer science education. The panelists are investigating approaches to student participation in FOSS that produce results that are contributed to the FOSS community and actually used by others.

Software engineering has emerged as a discipline, but it is still new and relatively small. It is important to consider how this process has progressed, and to ensure that the continued evolution of the discipline has the support and attention that will ensure success. Nancy Mead has positively influenced software engineering education for the past several decades. This paper discusses Nancypsilas influence on software engineering education through the Working Group on Software Engineering Education and Training (WGSEET). The intention of this focus is to celebrate Nancypsilas accomplishment, but also suggest that the software engineering education community needs similar leadership and community participation to ensure that progress continues.

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.

In this paper, we present an example humanitarian open-source software project that has been used since January 2006 at a small liberal-arts college as an experiment in undergraduate CS education. Sahana (Sinhalese for relief) is a free and open-source disaster management system developed in Sri Lanka by a group of IT professionals following the 2004 Asian tsunami. It is a web-based tool that addresses the IT coordination problems that typically occur in trying to recover from a large-scale disaster. We are currently exploring the wider use of Sahana as a sustainable model and platform for teaching about open-source software development while at the same time allowing CS students and educators to make a socially useful contribution of their time, effort, and expertise. This paper presents our experiences with Sahana including the benefits for both academia and industry.

BACKGROUND: Scientific workflows improve the process of scientific experiments by making computations explicit, underscoring data flow, and emphasizing the participation of humans in the process when intuition and human reasoning are required. Workflows for experiments also highlight transitions among experimental phases, allowing intermediate results to be verified and supporting the proper handling of semantic mismatches and different file formats among the various tools used in the scientific process. Thus, scientific workflows are important for the modeling and subsequent capture of bioinformatics-related data. While much research has been conducted on the implementation of scientific workflows, the initial process of actually designing and generating the workflow at the conceptual level has received little consideration. RESULTS: We propose a structured process to capture scientific workflows at the conceptual level that allows workflows to be documented efficiently, results in concise models of the workflow and more-correct workflow implementations, and provides insight into the scientific process itself. The approach uses three modeling techniques to model the structural, data flow, and control flow aspects of the workflow. The domain of biomolecular structure determination using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy is used to demonstrate the process. Specifically, we show the application of the approach to capture the workflow for the process of conducting biomolecular analysis using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. CONCLUSION: Using the approach, we were able to accurately document, in a short amount of time, numerous steps in the process of conducting an experiment using NMR spectroscopy. The resulting models are correct and precise, as outside validation of the models identified only minor omissions in the models. In addition, the models provide an accurate visual description of the control flow for conducting biomolecular analysis using NMR spectroscopy experiment.

The benefits of individual undergraduate research projects to students include preparation for graduate work, enrichment of the academic experience, honing of problem-solving skills and more. However, the involvement of undergraduates in on-going multi-institution research projects presents a unique set of challenges. This poster describes the issues resulting from the involvement of undergraduates in a bioinformatics research project in the area of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.

Most graduate students and even upper-level undergraduates desire to maximize control of their learning experience. One approach to supporting self-directed learning is to allow students to control course particulars such as assignments and due dates. This presentation describes an approach that allows students to define their own grading rubric for a semester-long software project and then to self-assess their grade on the project according to the rubric. The approach has been employed successfully in a graduate web application design and development course.

This poster presents the results of a comparison of retention rates for students in a Masters of Computer Science degree program located in the United States. This study is unusual in that it compares retention for an entire degree program where the same program is offered in both distance education and traditional on-campus formats.

This paper reports on a comparison of student opinion of student-defined projects and self-grading strategies between students in online and face-to-face environments as part of an ongoing survey-based study into strategies that support autonomous learning. The course used in the study is a Web Application Design and Development course which is part of the Software Engineering certificate and software concentration in the MSCS at Rensselaer (RPI) at Hartford. The study has been underway since the fall of 2001 and has an audience of working professional students. During the spring 2004 semester, the course was offered in both an online and a face-to-face format with roughly equivalent numbers of students in both sections. Students were surveyed towards the beginning and at the end of the semester on their opinions of the approaches used in the course and of their learning. This paper presents some background in autonomous or self-directed learning, describes the study including the approach and environment, and discusses results of student surveys comparing results for online and face-to-face students

This paper introduces a module which has been submitted to the SWENET initiative that is collecting examples of software engineering teaching and learning modules. The module itself introduces the concept of design by contract as a rigorous approach for designing and producing more reliable software. The module introduces the concept of assertions and more specifically, preconditions and postconditions. The ideas presented in this module describe a formal approach to software construction that can easily be understood by both undergraduates and graduates. The module also provides guidelines for specifying good contracts. The material presented in this module is primarily derived from "Design by Contract by Example" by Richard Mitchell and Jim McKim (2002)

The Web application design and development course offered at Rensselaer at Hartford uses a project-based approach where students construct a Web application of their own choosing. For the past two years, the instructor of this course has used a student self-grading approach where, as part of defining the requirements for the project, students also define grade specifications for project grades of 'A', 'B', and 'C'. We discuss the motivation and approach to self grading and reports on a survey-based study used to determine student attitude toward the self-defined project and the self-grading approaches. Results of the survey indicate that students are moderately satisfied with the self-grading approach when used in conjunction with the student-defined project.

Summary form only given. As the number of undergraduate software engineering programs increases, what does this imply about the future role of graduate programs in software engineering? This panel will explore changes that may be required to existing graduate software engineering programs to adapt to the increasing number of undergraduates with bachelor's degrees in software engineering entering graduate software engineering programs. In particular, the questions the panel will consider include: How should graduate software engineering programs adapt to accommodate the arrival of students with BSSE degrees? Should graduate software engineering curricula change because of the growth in BSSE programs, and, if so, how? Should a BSSE degree substitute for the industry experience requirement commonly used in MSSE programs? Will graduate software engineering education still have value in industry for a BSSE graduate? What is the role of post-baccalaureate certificate programs in relation to graduate software engineering degree programs? How does the arrival of accreditation for software engineering impact graduate software engineering education? The panel participants have experience with both undergraduate and graduate software engineering education delivered in both degree and certificate programs. The panel has also been organized to include perspectives from the U.S. and Europe as well as a perspective from industry.

One important concern of industry is that software engineering students have little or no experience in coming up to speed on a substantial existing software project. Indeed, the typical project course in academe tends to be soup to nut: problem statement to requirements to design to code. Many courses omit some of these steps or the instructors may provide some parts. At Rensselaer we've designed a project that lives beyond the scope of any single semester. The Stooge project began in 1996 in a section of our object oriented programming and design course and has been enhanced by the students of that course every semester since. We present some of the lessons learned in teaching such a course.

Production of software is growing at a phenomenal rate worldwide. In addition, the increasingly global business climate has accelerated the need for business software. There are too few software engineers to produce and maintain software to meet this demand. One possible solution to correcting this shortfall is reeducating existing non-software employees to become software engineers. For the past two years, the Industry/University (UU) subgroup of the Working Group on Software Engineering Education and Training (WGSEET) has been investigating active collaborations between companies and universities in which employees without formal software education are reeducated to become software engineers. This paper reports on our findings by discussing our approach to the investigation, outlining the factors involved in successful collaboration construction and execution, and describing alumni views of the knowledge and skills transferred by the collaboration.

The face of the student body in post-secondary degree programs in the United States is changing as an increasing number of students work full-time while attaining an advanced degree [13]. As the student population includes greater numbers of working professionals, a corresponding change in the instructional approaches used to educate the maturing student population is required. Knowles' theory of andragogy [9] is a set of principles that can be used to guide adult learning. This paper describes an application of andragogy to a graduate-level Web Technologies course comprised of working professional students. In this paper, the working professional is characterized and an educational philosophy based on the theory of andragogy is presented. The application of andragogy to a Web Technologies course is described and the results are discussed.

Computer Science as an academic discipline should be guided not only by the "state of the art", but also by the "state of the practice"[1]. Over the last few years, Internet/Web has been undeniably the most "high profile" practice of computing. Yet, Computer Science curricula across the country have not kept up with this development - not many schools are offering courses, concentrations and/or majors that identify the Internet/Web as the central principle, and address its issues and needs.In this panel, the panelists will share their experience designing courses and concentrations to address this need, and present their vision for what an Internet-related Curriculum should include: the courses, the technologies, and the overarching themes. The viewpoints presented here are quite diverse: arguing in favor of Internet-related coursework for majors versus non-majors, as a course/minor/major, as an across-the-curriculum theme, as an interdisciplinary endeavor, as an introductory course versus a capstone course, and from the points of view of a community college, four-year institutions and a graduate institution. We hope that these diverse viewpoints will foster vigorous discussion at the panel about the place of Internet-Computing in the Computer Science curriculum, and its design.

In this paper, we present our fundamental belief that a curriculum for graduate software engineering courses should contain a strong application element. Since software engineering is best learned through application, we feel that education of software engineers must have a practical nature. We also identify several issues that we consider key in the development of such courses for graduate and postgraduate students. Our observations are based on our student population which consists almost entirely of full-time working professionals in the process of obtaining a Master's in Computer Science. We have identified the following issues as being key in the development of an advanced software engineering curriculum.

I describe my experiences in teaching a first graduate level software engineering course using distance education. Held during the spring semester of 1997, Software Engineering 1 (SE1) was taught to 20 local students in Hartford Connecticut, and 15 tape-delay students located at eight different sites across the country. The distance learning environment, coupled with the fact that the local and tape-delay students were on a variety of viewing schedules presented a myriad of challenges to effective instruction. This paper details the contents and approach used in SE1, and describes the distance learning experience from both the instructor's perspective and the students' viewpoints. I outline my perceived impact of the course, and summarize student response to the course including verbatim student feedback. Based on the mixed results that both my students and I experienced, I conclude the paper with a discussion of changes I would like to make the next time SE1 is taught via distance education.