| title | author | layout |
|---|---|---|
Information for project mentors |
UCOSP Steering |
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We couldn't run this program without the support of our wonderful industry mentors.
- Projects must be Open Source.
- Projects should have a real user community.
- Projects should have an ongoing life (before and after the UCOSP involvement).
- Projects need a mentor who will meet the obligations of a mentor listed below.
- Projects should have a reasonable task that a group of students can undertake together in a single term. In the past we have had project groups where each student worked mostly independently on their own task related to a common project. These were not as effective learning experiences as projects requiring deeper group collaboration. We prefer to accept the latter.
At present we do not have a formal mechanism for submitting a project proposal. You need to talk to one of the steering committee members about whether your proposal would be appropriate and provide a project description. Fall projects need to be settled by mid to late July and winter projects by late November.
Your primary role as a project mentor is to determine the technical tasks for the students to complete and mentor them in this process.
A good guideline is that a UCOSP project should take the student an average of 8-10 hours per week over a 12 week term. That is a total of 100-120 hours. Since much of that is lost to orientation on the project and communication, we estimate that the task should be roughly what one person (who knows your project) can accomplish in about 2 weeks of full-time work.
- Attend the code sprint and orient your students on your project. If this is a problem, you can sometimes have a TA stand in for you.
- Meet with your student team weekly, on Skype, IRC, or some other distributed meeting tool.
- Keep track of the students’ weekly progress, tasks and deliverables.
- Provide a short mid-term evaluation of each student to the student, their home-faculty mentor and the steering committee. We will send you a reminder.
- Ensure that your project submits a blog post every three weeks during the term. You may assign the task of writing the posts to your students.
- Submit a final evaluation for each student to the steering committee by the deadline for that particular term. Once the steering committee has approved the grades, these will be communicated to the home-faculty mentors who will submit them to the home university.
- Inform the UCOSP steering committee of any problems during the term.
- Submit a short “experience report” to give us feedback on what works and what does not, so that we can improve the process.
UCOSP will match students to your project and give you contact information for each student and for their home-faculty liaison.
UCOSP will make arrangements for the code sprint at the beginning of the term including student travel arrangements and accommodation and meeting space for your team. You are responsible for your own travel and accommodation for the sprint.
UCOSP will provide a blog for communication among all UCOSP members. In the event that you have a problem with a student missing meetings, not meeting commitments or otherwise not performing, the UCOSP steering committee can provide advice and practical assistance contacting both the student and the home-faculty liaison.
About 3-5 hours per week in addition to the code sprint.
- Implemented new features in a web application. Recent projects have used Django, Rails, Java, Javascript.
- Worked on Eclispe plugins.
- Worked on mobile phone applications.
Get in touch with us! Email us at [email protected].