Integrating Open Source GIS Software in Undergraduate Curriculum, Research, and Outreach - Recent Experiences at Salisbury University

The Department of Geography and Geosciences at Salisbury University has a long tradition of teaching geographic information science. Until recently, most of the courses and research activities focused on commercial software offerings. However, the Department recently integrated Free and Open Source Software for GIS (FOSSG) into its curriculum, research, and outreach. Curriculum changes included introducing students to FOSSG in traditional GIS courses using QGIS, and creating two entirely new courses in Enterprise GIS and GIS Programming using PostGIS, GDAL, and Spatial Lite. Through a competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates grant (REU), students participated in cutting edge research projects in parallel processing with Hadoop and spatial Hadoop for cluster computing, and CUDA for GPGPU calculation on embarrassingly parallel processes for raster data. Finally, undergraduate interns working in the Department\u27s Eastern Shore Regional GIS Cooperative (ESRGC) developed geodashboards using node.js, PostGIS, and Leaflet, while a special topics course developed a GIS based iphone and Android application used by 4,000 participants in the annual Sea Gull Century bike ride using GeoJSON, Leaflet, and javascript. In addition to highlighting the successes of these activities, this paper will discuss the process we used to make the necessary changes in our curriculum, secure the necessary funding for external projects, and the training approach we used to get our computer science students proficient in programming with FOSSG tools

Project based learning on industrial informatics: applying IoT to urban garden

Copyright (c) 2018 IEEEThe fast evolution of technologies forces teachers to trade content off for self-learning. PBL is one of the best ways to promote self-learning and simultaneously boost motivation. In this paper, we present our experience introducing project-based learning in the last year subject. New Internet of Things (IoT) topic allows us to carry out complete projects, integrating different technologies and tools. Moreover, the selection of open-source and standard free technologies makes easy and cheap the access to hardware and software platforms used. We carefully have picked communication, data management, and programming tools that we think would be attractive to our students. They can start making fast prototyping with little initial skills and, at the same time, these are serious and popular tools widely used in the industry. In this paper, we report on the design of a project-based learning for our course and the impact this has on the student satisfaction and motivation. Surveys taught us that tuning the courses towards developing real projects on the field, has a large impact on acceptance, learning objectives achievements and motivation towards the course content.”I Plan Propio Integral de Docencia de la Universidad de Málaga” y Proyecto de Innovación Educativa PIE17/085, de la Universidad de Málaga. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Undergraduate Research Opportunities in OSS

Using Open Source Software (OSS) in undergraduate teaching in universities is now commonplace. Students use OSS applications and systems in their courses on programming, operating systems, DBMS, web development to name but a few. Studying OSS projects from both a product and a process view also forms part of the software engineering curriculum at various universities. Many students have taken part in OSS projects as well as developers. At the University of Lincoln, under the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme (UROS), undergraduate student researchers have the chance to work over the summer embedded within an existing research centre on a UROS project. Here two such projects within the Centre for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) are described: Collaborative Development for the XO Laptop (CODEX) and Software Modularity in Open Source Software (SoMOSS) . The CODEX project focused on creating resources to support students undertaking software application development for the XO laptop, and the SoMOSS project focused on architectural studies of OSS instant messaging software. Both projects achieved successful research outcomes; more importantly, both student researchers benefited directly from the encouragement and concrete assistance that they received through interaction with the wider OSS research community. Both projects are ongoing and present further research opportunities for students

Introducing High School Students to Version Control, Continuous Integration, and Quality Assurance

Software Engineering concepts such as version control, continuous integration, and unit testing are often not presented in college computer science curriculums until the third year of study, after completing several semesters of programming courses. Throughout the summer of 2023, two high school students volunteered in our lab at Wayne State University where I'm a graduate research assistant and Ph.D. student in computer science. The students had taken AP Computer Science but had no prior experience with software engineering or software testing. This paper documents our experience devising a group project to teach the requisite software engineering skills to implement automated tests that meaningfully contribute to open-source scientific computing projects developed in connection with our lab. We describe the concepts covered, tools used, and software tests written in this early introduction to software engineering while maintaining shared emphases on education and the deployment of our work.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Towards using online portfolios in computing courses

The direct experience we had with teaching a summer pre-college computing course in which we adopted an online portfolio approach has led us to consider the use of online portfolios in our regular computer science undergraduate courses. The technical challenges we foresee include: the necessary support from the college\u27s IT department; the use of Microsoft-based web authoring technologies vs. the use of Open Source / freeware counterparts; the need for adequate technical knowledge on the part of our faculty; the need for server-side hardware and software resources

Free and open source software development of IT systems

IT system development, integration, deployment, and administration benefit significantly from free and open source software (FOSS) tools and services. Affordability has been a compelling reason for adopting FOSS in computing curricula and equipping computing labs with support infrastructure. Using FOSS systems and services, however, is just the first step in taking advantage of how FOSS development principles and practices can impact student learning in IT degree programs. Above all, FOSS development of IT systems requires changes to how students, instructors, and other contributors work collaboratively and openly and get involved and invested in project activities. In this paper I examine the challenges to engage students in FOSS development projects proposed by real clients. A six-week course project revealed problems with adopting FOSS development and collaboration across different activities and roles that student team members have assumed. Despite these problems, students have showed a genuine and strong interest in gaining more practice with FOSS development. FOSS development teaching was further refined in two other courses to learn about adequate teaching strategies and the competencies that students achieve when they participate in FOSS development of IT systems

Using GitHub as a Teaching Tool for Programming Courses

GitHub has become the most popular code management platform in the software development industry. It allows developers to manage their software development projects and collaborate with each other. Recently, educators also started using GitHub as a teaching tool for programming courses by hosting code samples and managing student assignments. In this study, we examine how GitHub is being used in academia, and we discuss the motivations and the benefits of using this platform. We also present authors’ experience of using GitHub in programming courses of a software engineering program. We discuss the benefits and challenges of using GitHub and GitHub classroom in the classroom.Cockrell School of Engineerin

A gentle transition from Java programming to Web Services using XML-RPC

Exposing students to leading edge vocational areas of relevance such as Web Services can be difficult. We show a lightweight approach by embedding a key component of Web Services within a Level 3 BSc module in Distributed Computing. We present a ready to use collection of lecture slides and student activities based on XML-RPC. In addition we show that this material addresses the central topics in the context of web services as identified by Draganova (2003)

Developing High Performance Computing Resources for Teaching Cluster and Grid Computing courses

High-Performance Computing (HPC) and the ability to process large amounts of data are of paramount importance for UK business and economy as outlined by Rt Hon David Willetts MP at the HPC and Big Data conference in February 2014. However there is a shortage of skills and available training in HPC to prepare and expand the workforce for the HPC and Big Data research and development. Currently, HPC skills are acquired mainly by students and staff taking part in HPC-related research projects, MSc courses, and at the dedicated training centres such as Edinburgh University’s EPCC. There are few UK universities teaching the HPC, Clusters and Grid Computing courses at the undergraduate level. To address the issue of skills shortages in the HPC it is essential to provide teaching and training as part of both postgraduate and undergraduate courses. The design and development of such courses is challenging since the technologies and software in the fields of large scale distributed systems such as Cluster, Cloud and Grid computing are undergoing continuous change. The students completing the HPC courses should be proficient in these evolving technologies and equipped with practical and theoretical skills for future jobs in this fast developing area. In this paper we present our experience in developing the HPC, Cluster and Grid modules including a review of existing HPC courses offered at the UK universities. The topics covered in the modules are described, as well as the coursework projects based on practical laboratory work. We conclude with an evaluation based on our experience over the last ten years in developing and delivering the HPC modules on the undergraduate courses, with suggestions for future work

Introducing TU100 ‘My Digital Life’: Ubiquitous computing in a distance learning environment

In this paper we describe the Open University’s progress towards delivering an introduction to ubiquitous computing within a distance-learning environment. Our work is strongly influenced by the philosophy of learning-through-play and we have taken technologies originally designed for children’s education and adapted them for adult learners, many of whom will have no formal experience of computer science or information technology. We will introduce two novel technologies; Sense, a drag-and-drop programming language based on Scratch; and the SenseBoard, an inexpensive hardware device that can be connected to the student’s computer, through which they can sense their environment and display outputs. This paper is not intended as a detailed discussion of individual technologies (they will follow in time), rather it should serve as an introduction to the Open University’s method of teaching and how we hope to continue to recruit new computer scientists and engineers using novel technologies