User:MSkalak

Bio

Michael Skalak is Lecturer/Technician in Dickinson College's Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. His interests are in algorithms and pedagogy.

FOSS field trip

Part 1, Sourceforge

I looked at the games tab. There are 25247 projects in 15 different languages. The most popular ones are listed at the top of the page.

For a specific project I examined FreeCiv. It let's you play a Civilization-like game. It's mostly written in C. The project appears very active and had its last release in February. It was unclear how to tell the number or type of committers.

Part 2, OpenHub

OpenMRS is primarily in Java. It has 3.7m lines of code. The second most used language is Javascript. Of the top three languages, Java has the most comments at 32%. There are about 25 commits/month and 10 contributors/month. The top contributors have been with the project for more than 5 years, 5 years, and 2 years.

FOSS In Courses Activity

My algorithms course is a writing requirement course, meaning that students are expected to produce and edit 15 pages of technical writing in the discipline. In the past, I have had them create or edit Wikipedia articles as an option for the assignment. I would like to add writing documentation for a FOSS project as an option as well. This might be a difficult to do as writing that amount of documentation could be prohibitively difficult, particularly for a project that they are unfamiliar with. I'm going to continue thinking about ways to effectively try this idea as I go through the POSSE workshop.