OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
TESTIMONY
By Alice Jin
Knowing how to program is cool. Using programming
skills to help other people is even cooler. Winning second
place at the National Conference for doing that is just the
cherry on top. Open Source Software Development inspires
participants to use their talents to benefit the society and
tackle the problems in innovative ways.
OSSD consists of two parts:
1) “Participants work as part of a team to participate
in the development, debugging, and document of a new or existing open source
software project [that has] educational or social value.”
Students can look for an existing project online and improve on that as a team, or
they can start a project from scratch. Our team looked for projects that can inspire
and benefit the society. Benefit how, exactly? We were not quite sure. Scrolling
through SourceForge, we did not find one project that particularly piqued our
interest. After a few early morning meetings, our team decided to start a project of
our own: a virtual math tutor that helps first graders solve word problems. “But
wait, can’t Wolfram Alpha do that already?” some may ask. Our team believed that
simply giving students answers is more detrimental than beneficial. Therefore, we
decided that the program should be interactive and guide the first graders along the
steps to solve the problem. However, our team had a problem of our own: how can
we instruct the computer to break apart a word problem like a math veteran? Well,
hello Stanford Part of Speech Tagger. This software reads a piece of text and
assigns each word its part of speech. From there, our team worked to build a
program that could substitute a math teacher for first graders having trouble with
word problems.
2) “Through a multimedia presentation and entrant notebook, the team
explains in detail how it has contributed to the project”
Sure, it’s cool that we created a piece of software. But why did we decide to work on
this specific project? What is so great about it? How does it benefit others? Who does
it benefit? These are only some of the questions we needed to address in our binder.
Many students focus only on the software that they neglect the binder, which is 45%
of the points needed to semi-finalize. Twelve semi-finalists will present the project
in front of judges at the National Conference to be named as one of the ten finalists.
In our presentation, our team integrated our research, goal, benefits first graders
will reap, and hopes for the software’s future. We stre ????????????????????)??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????)???????????????????????????????????????????????()
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