Open Source Comes to Campus/Curriculum

The following is a list of activities in roughly the order we run them at an event. (To see our typical schedule, see the Schedule page.)

Computer Setup
This starts off the day. Direct attendees to the computer setup page and have mentors walk around and see if they're getting stuck.

Open Source Communication Tools
The tools lecture, which also currently includes a "What is Open Source?" component, aims to familiarize students with tools like IRC, issue trackers, mailing lists, and version control through several activities.

Learning Git
This is a hands-on activity which teaches version control, generally, and git via github specifically. You can see the current and past versions of this presentation here.

Career Panel
There are several possible options for the career panel.

History and Ethics of Free Software
This activity has been mostly omitted from recent Open Source Comes to Campus events - mostly for time issues, but also because we think it needs a lot of work.

If you'd like to take a look, it's here.

(If you want to help improve it, that would be swell.)

Contributions Workshop
The Contributions Workshop is the part of the day where students begin making contributions to FOSS projects. If there is time, it may make sense to include some version of the Finding a Project demo/activity. Finding a Project can be run as a demo, a student activity, or both. If both, we recommend introducing the activity, having a mentor demo it by walking through it at the front of the room/on the projector, and then having the student do it. We recommend having the students do the activity in pairs or small groups.

The workshop itself
For the workshop itself, one of the organizers introduces and explains that some of the mentors at the event have open source projects they maintain or contribute to and that students can work in small groups to contribute to those projects. The mentors then take 2-5 minutes to give a brief overview of their project and the types of tasks students can work on. The organizer assigns different mentors to different spots in the room and writes down the layout on the board/displays it on the projector so that students can find a group. The organizer should also include a link to first tasks, additional tasks or whatever resource is being used for the event to keep track of projects.

If students do not want to join a specific project, they should join the "self-guided" group. This group of students will have one or more mentors who will help them find their own projects, building on the work done in the Finding a Project activity (if that activity was done).

Wrap up
After one hour of the workshop, the organizer will lead the wrap up. Often, the workshop will continue after the wrap up. If that's the case, make very, very clear that students are welcome to stay and keep working.

During the wrap up:


 * Students report on their progress so far
 * Organizers talk about opportunities to follow up:
 * Future open source events at the school
 * Future open source events at the general area
 * General FOSS opportunities
 * things that OpenHatch is doing
 * Organizers ask students to fill out the exit survey

Wrap Up
Some notes on how we do our wrap ups can be found here.