Participation in Open Source Software (OSS) projects offers real software development experience for students and other newcomers seeking to develop their skills. However, onboarding to an OSS project brings various challenges, including finding a suitable task among various open issues. Selecting an appropriate starter task requires newcomers to identify the skills needed to solve a project issue and avoiding tasks too far from their skill set. However, little is known about how effective newcomers are in identifying the skills needed to resolve an issue. We asked 154 undergrad students to evaluate issues from OSS projects and infer the skills needed to contribute. Students reported a total of 94 skills, which we classified into 10 categories. We compared the students' answers to those collected from 6 professional developers. In general, students misidentified and missed several skills (f-measure=0.37). Students had results closer to professional developers for skills related to database, operating infrastructure, programming concepts, and programming language, and they had worse results in identifying skills related to debugging and program comprehension. Our results can help educators who seek to use OSS as part of their courses and OSS communities that want to label newcomer-friendly issues to facilitate onboarding of new contributors.
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A "Low-Floor" Multimeter: Supporting E-textile Debugging by Revealing Voltage and Continuity
STEAM curriculums are widely implemented in K-12 schools, as part of the effort to promote computational thinking skills. This, together with increased accessibility of electronic components and kits, has opened the door for novices to engage in physical computing projects. Debugging these projects challenges students to learn and apply electrical concepts together with programming skills. Multimeter, the most common tool for measuring electric circuits, is placing a very high bar for novices to use. This paper presents a work in progress toward the development of a low-floor multimeter. The tool is designed to be used by high-school students with no prior electricity knowledge as part of their e-textile curricula. By providing students the opportunity to form a conceptual understanding of voltage and current flow, we hope to scaffold their exploration and debugging process in a meaningful way.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1742081
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10163645
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1429 to 1429
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3372713
