Overview of the Week

This week has been a very busy week!!! On Monday, in lecture we went over the difference between merging and rebasing. Before the lecture, I didn’t know about rebasing, so the lecture was really informative. I think knowing about the difference between merging and rebasing will become even more important in the future when we start working on our own open source projects. On Wednesday, we were divided up into our groups and had the opportunity to discuss our future projects.

First Group Meeting

On Wednesday, I had my first group meeting with Karishma and Selam. During our first group meeting, we were able to decide a group meeting time, Mondays at 4:45 (after class). We were also able to pick a project, Oppia. Oppia is an educational platform that aims to help anyone learn anything they want in an effective way. We chose to work on Oppia because we liked the goal of the project and also because we felt that there were multiple ways that we could contribute to the project. On Oppia’s github page, they suggest various ways of contributing, such as fixing issues or starting your own project. We felt that if we were not able to start on our own project, we would be able to work on issues in the codebase. Many of the issues in the codebase are marked as good issues for first timers. Since Oppia seemed to have many ways of contributing, we decided that we wanted to start on our own project. Selam reached out to Oppia’s team asking if it would be possible for us to start own project and if they had any suggestions on what we could do.

Starting Our Project

During the week, Selam continued to speak with Sean and he suggested a few projects that we could work on. Selam, Karishma, and I had a short meeting to discuss the suggestions. We decided that we wanted to work on something called the Partnership Package. One of the major problems that Oppia has is that it struggles explaining to parents and teachers how they’re platform can help students. The Partnership Package is meant to solve this issue. We hope to create a website that will be able to inform parents and teachers on how they can use Oppia to help their students learn. During our quick meeting, we decided that we would do some research on Oppia and the issue they’re having in order to create some solutions. We hope to come up with some solutions and create a document explaining what we plan to do. We will be sharing this document with Oppia’s team. We are also planning on having a phone call with Oppia so we can go over our document and hear their feedback.

Summary

I am really excited about working with Selam and Karishma and about working with Oppia. Oppia’s team has been very responsive and helpful in deciding a project. I am also really excited about working on the Partnership Package! We have been brainstorming ideas for the website and we have some very exciting ideas. I think the Partnership Package will allow us to make a big impact on Oppia. So far everything has been going really well and I am really excited to start really working on teh site!!