All: Mike McCandless pointed me to the dev list and he kindly started a google doc with project ideas <https://docs.google.com/document/d/10luAXYfHDe3j_pF9dslPdDzDMHaUqMTmnPI6QEgUP4w/edit?usp=sharing>.
I've been co-teaching a summer internship course this past couple of summers at CMU. The core of the course is the work experience. Students in teams of 5 work together for 11 weeks for 40 hours/week on a large project in a real code base, meeting with two mentors once a week to guide the work. The instructors also meet with the students once a week beyond the classes to coach students to ensure they're staying on top of the work and engaging well with mentors. The classes are ~3 hours a week on topics in software engineering to which every developer should be exposed. . I have worked with OpenStack projects and Eclipse Adoptium projects this past couple of summers and they are participating again. I would love to engage students with Apache projects, and I think Lucene is a great community in which they can learn. My apologies, but I have had a late start this year and classes start on 13 May, so I would need mentor commitments and project ideas over this next week. The rest of the email is a broader description of the course. Do please ask questions. Over the time this course has been evolving, the student outcomes get better and better, and watching the students gain confidence this past couple of summers has been brilliant. I hope Apache Lucene can contribute projects and mentors this summer, and thank you for the consideration. kind regards, always stephe --- cut We are building out the CMU internship course for open source software engineering again. The ask from last year (and *call out differences for this year in bold*): - We are looking for projects that a team of 4-5 students could tackle together with at least two mentors for each project. (Life happens and having the built-in mentor redundancy helps. I’ve had mentors get laid off, change jobs, and take summer vacation.) As we saw last year, mentors can certainly overlap more than one student team project if appropriate and they have the time. - Mentors are expected to meet student teams once a week for an hour (via any video conference setup folks want to use), and to be available by email during the rest of the week to answer any urgent questions. - *This summer we are running the class from 13 May to 31 July (11 weeks)*. - *We want to try teaching concurrently in both campuses Doha, Qatar (GMT+3) and Pittsburgh (GMT-5), USA. The entire course will be taught virtually this year, without a classroom.* I certainly did something similar a few years ago when I was teaching at Johns Hopkins (20 students) with another group in Galway (16 students). The morning class in Pittsburgh will be the afternoon in Doha. - *We likely have 15-20 students in each location, so if you had on the order of 2-4 team projects with mentors that fit the format that would be fantastic. * - *We are considering going so far as to choose the teams across time zones to get them working remotely from the start.* Last year, after six weeks together in class and daily stand-ups, the students scattered home away from Doha, and all of them worked remotely the last four weeks. They proved they could work remotely together. Of course, the relationships with mentors have always been remote. The profs in Doha and Pitt want to try remote from the beginning. (I have a few concerns but I’m also always up to experiment on students.) - We post the projects on the first day of class and will organize the teams in that first couple of days, so student teams are introduced to their mentors in the first week of class and expected to organize that first meeting to begin the project learning curve. That’s when mentors point students at any tutorials and bootstrap materials, recommended getting started materials, etc. - We have set the expectations with the students that they will be spending 20-40 hours of time per week on the project. It is an internship-like experience. · *Two co-teachers run classes on three days a week for 80 minutes, and I will guest lecture a collection of classes. *(Last year, there was just the real professor and I.) · The three of us will provide a coaching session with each team to ensure they are working with the mentors well. · Students generally have Windows or Mac laptops, but we have teaching assistants on each site that we can start to prep any other access to resources they might need. · As with last year, mentors have a lot of freedom to experiment. Some have run joint sessions if they are mentoring more students for learning curves. Some have run Slack or Discord channels. What have I forgotten to mention? What new questions have occurred since last time we talked? I’m really hoping the ASF can participate this year. -- Stephen R. Walli +1 425 785 6102 @stephenrwalli (LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenrwalli/>, Twitter, etc.) Public Presentations on Open Source Software and Standards <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdtp42LZvQ1aBykIT1Ksza1JOrOXtJ6-h>
