FOSTERING PRE-UNIVERSITY STUDENT PARTICIPATION IN OSGEO THROUGH THE GOOGLE CODE-IN COMPETITION

International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences

Rautenbach, V.^1¹  McKenna, J.^5²  Delucchi, L.^4³  Leo, M. Di^2⁴  Andreo, V.^3⁵  Kudrnovsky, H.^5⁶ 

[1] Centre for Geoinformation Science, Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology, University of Pretoria, South Africa^1;Comunidad gvSIG, Uruguay^6;Edmund Mach Foundation, Research and Innovation Centre, Italy^4;European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Italy^2;ITC - Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, the Netherlands^3;OSGeo^5

关键词: Education;    Outreach;    Pre-university students;    Open Source;   

DOI  :  10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W8-175-2018

学科分类：地球科学(综合)

来源: Copernicus Publications

【 摘 要 】

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation’s (OSGeo) vision is to empower everyone, from pre-university students to professionals, with open source geospatial applications, tools and resources. In 2017, OSGeo decided to participate for the first time in the Code-in competition. Google Code-in (GCI) is an annual online competition aimed at introducing pre-university students (13–17 years) to open source projects, development and communities, through short 3–5 hour tasks. This is a unique opportunity to interact with pre-university students and to encourage them to become part of OSGeo. In this paper, we present OSGeo’s involvement in GCI with the purpose of establishing lessons learned to improve our approach in the next editions of GCI. Over the 51 days of the competition, 279 students completed 649 OSGeo tasks. Students consistently communicated with the mentors to discuss submission and receive inputs from the wide community of developers too. During the GCI, the mentors reviewed the students’ work and provided suggestions and feedback. Generally, the submissions were good and some of them are now part of the projects. As this was our first time participating in GCI these issues are seen as lessons learned and strategies to improve the process will be implemented based on the mentors’ experience. It is key to encourage these students to continue contributing to the OSGeo community, as they will bring new energy and ideas into the organisation; for many of these young students, this competition is a way to introduce them to the geospatial industry.

【 授权许可】

CC BY