recursion

As an alumni of the University of Minnesota Computer Science Department, I receive a bi-annual newsletter from the Department called SoundByte.

The Spring/Summer 2006 issue had an interesting article about an innovative two semester-long class taught by popular professor John Riedl.

The students who sign up for this class spend 30 weeks working on Chipmark, an open source de.lico.us knockoff. The cool thing about this is that they spend a long time working together on a real project, that runs on a real server, with real users. They also have to deal with legacy code, because each class builds on the previous class's work.

Here's some snippets from the article:

Do you want to learn how to really build software ... and get Upper Division CSci credits at the same time? Are you tired of 1-2 week assignments that just get thrown away when you finish them? Do you want to ge evaluated on your ability to build software, rather than your ability to memorize facts for a test? Then consider this class: working together with 10-12 focused students for 30 weeks over two semesters to deliver a useful open source software product to the world!

So read the first paragraph in an email invitation from Prof. John Riedl to Computer Science undergraduates. He wanted to give students the opportunity to participate in an unique class, gaining valuable experience building software in a way that isn't possible in a conventional classroom setting....

This project class isn't like other classes. Instead of attending lectures and coding textbook programs every few weeks, the Chipmark team meets twice a week to discuss progress and work together in the same room. The project has different areas of responsibility such as team lead, release manager, and user interface manager. This means that everyone has an area of responsibility and an opportunity for leadership....

UMN Computer Science majors learn how to program in Java in the second course they take. Chipmark team members apply their Java skills, but they also learn how much more there is to a software project than just writing code. They work with a wide range of industry standard tools including Ant (to build the software), CVS (for change management), Javascript and C++ (for browser extensions), Tomcat and MySQL(to run the Chipmark server), and MRTG (to monitor server status).

I think this is really cool. One of my constant complaints about my education is that the importance of source control was never addressed -- not even in my software engineering class (where, like the Chipmark project, our code was turned over to the next year's class -- sorry about the XML sit ups, guys!)

This class addresses that, and more. I wish I'd had the opportunity to take a class like that. I think it would have made me a better software developer, sooner.