User:Tom.naps

Tom Naps

For over 20 years Tom Naps was the primary Computer Science instructor at a small liberal arts college (Lawrence University in Appleton WI) where the Computer Science concentration was integrated into a Mathematics major. Currently he is completing his 14th year in a seven-member Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Tom is an active contributor to two large open-source projects in algorithm visualization. The first of these, JHAVE, delivers instructional visualizations on algorithms that span the entire curriculum. It relies on a client-server architecture, with both the client and server written in Java. Since 2011 he has been actively involved in the OpenDSA (Open Data Structures and Algorithms) project hosted at Virginia Tech. The client software for OpenDSA is developed in JavaScript, and that is where Tom has focused his efforts. The server back-end is currently written in Python using the Django framework.

At UWOshkosh, Tom has taught most of the courses in the curriculum. In particular he often teaches a project-oriented Software Engineering II course, and it is in that course that he hopes to incorporate HFOSS.

Intro IRC Activity, Answers to Part 1 questions

• How do people interact? Conversationally, using short phrases with the emphasis on communicating the essential meaning of what they intend to say instead of on the grammatical correctness

• What is the pattern of communication? At least in the sample meeting, I would characterize the pattern as an initial session in which the participants reported on progress made and problems encountered since the last meeting. Each reported item was followed by a brief discussion. This initial session was followed by a wrap-up session in which goals were established to hopefully be reached before the next meeting.

• Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning? The meetbot tags (indicated by # and the green font) help to organize the way one reads the transcript of the meeting. In a sense they breakdown the meeting into a hierarchical structure -- with #topics broken down into #info and #action items.

• Can you make any other observations? I would think that the transcript of the meeting is most useful if one of the participants uses it to write up a set of minutes for the meeting as soon as possible after the meeting concludes. That set of minutes then becomes the official record of the meeting, providing a much more readable form than the transcript itself.