PROJECT EVALUATIONS:

My goal coming into this class was to ultimately contribute to a social good open source project. I am excited to find that there are many projects available that fit my interests, but I decided to work on Oppia. Oppia is an online learning platform that has served over 430,000 students world wide. Contributors help to create free, quality lessons that students can use regardless of where they are at academically. Oppia’s goals aligns with my personal beliefs of increasing access and available resources to students in need.

This week I focused on conducting a project evaluation of Oppia. Prior to this evaluation, I evaluated the OpenRefine project where I was able to read and critique their code base, community responsiveness, ease of use, etc. When looking at Oppia’s codebase, I was pleased to find that they have done an excellent job of up-keeping their project. Although their community is not as encouraging/communicative as OpenRefine, it still does a great job of maintaining the repositories.

PRESENTATIONS:

Vicky’s presentation offered some insight on her work and also general information about open source communities. I appreciated that she told us about things such as HacktoberFest which before she mentioned it, I have never heard of. Additionally, prior to her coming into this class, I did not know that Vicky was an available resource at the university to contact/ask about open source, using GitHub, etc. Although I only have a few months left at NYU, I would love the opportunity to keep in touch with Vicky as she offered an interesting perspective to tech as someone who uses computer science in a non-traditional way.