Monday, March 28, 2011

National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance

A team of Faculty and Students from RIT's Center for Student Innovation headed to DC this past week to present a paper Undergraduate Student Experiences at a Summer Research Fellows Program in Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Student Innovation (CSI).
While this was not an Open Source event per se, nor was the research program, it happened that the majority of student projects we showcased at the conference were FOSS projects or used FOSS tech.

FOSS Projects included STEM games and Open Video Chat for the OLPC,  an environmental monitoring and rating web site for alternative energy homes was built on top of jQuery and a protein visualization and matching project was built in Python.

Student blogs of the event can be found here and here.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

A New Quarter and the Joint is Jumping!

Well, we're barely into our second week of the academic quarter and already things are humming.

Two Co-Ops, JT Mengel who did work on the animation system research for Fortune Hunter and did some of the development and all of the graphics for Lemonade Stand this past Fall is working with an effort to revamp the Sugar Labs www site. JT's also done some Drupal work for me on our Game Education Journal.  He's joined on the Sugar Labs project by Mike Devine, who has done Fortune Hunter work in a previous class as well.

Zachary Stephens and David Silverman have reached out to the Go Activity developers to pick up some work on their project this quarter, Zachary Full-Time and David part-time.

Nice press release from Red Hat on OVC and POSSE this week.  Linux Pro will be doing a story on it and I've been asked to do an Open Source.Com piece on it as well.

Last but not least had the first of many meetings with colleagues from Uuniversity of Rochester this week on helping out with WeBWork, a 15 year-old web project for doong computer-based math assignments for college and upper level high school students.  We hope to be helping them do some modernization and polishing of this fantastic site.  They're also looking for guidance on making it a better-known HFOSS project and we'll be helping them there as well.

Last but not least we had an opportunity to assist our friends over at Oregon State University with an NSF grant to do some improvements to Beaversource.  Fingers crossed that it gets awarded because we're really looking forward to working with them and on Beaversource.