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Team Project Experiences in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS)

Published: 09 December 2015 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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  1. Team Project Experiences in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS)

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education
    ACM Transactions on Computing Education  Volume 15, Issue 4
    Special Issue on Team Projects in Computing Education
    December 2015
    145 pages
    EISSN:1946-6226
    DOI:10.1145/2850426
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 09 December 2015
    Accepted: 01 October 2014
    Revised: 01 July 2014
    Received: 01 April 2014
    Published in TOCE Volume 15, Issue 4

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