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How Can Open Source Prepare Your Students for Professional Practice?
Conference proceeding   Open access

How Can Open Source Prepare Your Students for Professional Practice?

Heidi J. C. Ellis, Gregory W. Hislop, Lori Postner, Grant Braught, Darci Burdge and Cam Macdonell
Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V.2, pp 1697-1697
18 Feb 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3770761.3777095
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3770761.3777095View
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Abstract

Social and professional topics Social and professional topics -- Computing education
Open source provides a great approach for students to learn about large scale software, team processes, and tools that comprise professional software development. Open source can motivate learning in software engineering by providing scale, complexity, and product evolution that in-class examples cannot match. Finally, open source projects motivate students by providing an authentic, collaborative engagement environment for learning. Join us for a discussion with instructors on the myriad ways that open source software can be incorporated into classes or used to motivate students in clubs and extracurricular activities. Instructors who have tried open source with students will be invited to share their experience and offer examples of what they've done in the classroom. All participants will be encouraged to share ideas, discuss challenges and problems, and ask questions related to teaching with open source. Humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) provides the added benefits of appealing to students who are interested in humanitarian applications of computing and providing an opportunity to introduce all students to computing for social good. The BoF organizers are focused on HFOSS, and able to discuss that aspect of teaching open source. But the organizers also encourage faculty with interest in using any type of open source in the classroom to join in this discussion.

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