Simon Fraser University’s Surrey campus welcomed 42 computing science students from across Canada to participate in the 2015 Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP) Code Sprint January 15-18.

This semester, the participants, including five from SFU, will work with industry mentors on eight different open source projects in teams of two-to-four. Most of the work is done remotely with teams communicating virtually using mediums such as Skype and email.

The Code Sprint provides students with the opportunity to get started on their capstone projects as well as an opportunity to meet and learn more about the people they will be working with.

“This will be the only time members of each team will be in one place. It will be spent coding, forging closer groups and a bit of socializing,” says Ted Kirkpatrick, assistant director of SFU’s School of Computing Science at Surrey, and SFU faculty mentor for UCOSP, which trains students in distributed software development and team collaboration.

UCOSP is a unique experience that allows students to work on a successful open source project and to build on the work of predecessors.

“Whereas cooperative education might be more about learning organizational practice, UCOSP is about immersing students in a specific development practice,” says Kirkpatrick.

“Academic learning is very localized and projects often last one semester, while students in UCOSP are working on an ongoing, long-term project that is international. They are part of an actual team, an actual project and an actual work environment. These are things a classroom cannot offer.” 

He adds, software development increasingly is moving to a distributed model where work is being spread out over longer distances with more people involved.

“Look at Google. They have more than 50,000 employees working in over 70 offices in over 40 countries. Even look at SFU. We have over 30,000 students taking classes at campuses in Burnaby, Vancouver and Surrey. Work is no longer consolidated into one office, one city, one time zone and one country.”

Story credit/ SFU News