Students are also eager to engage the HFOSS methodology, which differs from the traditional mode of undergraduate instruction. Working with mentors and in teams on real-world development projects is a motivator for students, despite the extra challenge it means for instructors. Similarly, working with local clients and international development communities is another motivator. For example, students get to see directly that writing good documentation is as important as writing good code. The quality of their work improves as they recognize their increased level of public accountability. This message is constantly reinforced by mentors, peers, and clients.

Depending on the specific course or project, students come with different levels of expertise, ranging from no prior programming experience for an introductory course to having nearly completed the major requirements for upper-level and software-engineering courses. Engaging students through HFOSS must be done with sensitivity to their backgrounds and interests. But the projects themselves are rich and varied enough to accept contributions from students with different backgrounds. For example, students with no programming experience are still able to make significant contributions in requirements-gathering and documentation-writing. 4

We’ve found the sudents are comfortable working in virtual teams and groups, having grown up with Facebook and Instant Messenger and interacting with friends through all kinds of electronic media. They respond equally well to wikis for working collaboratively on documents and presentations and sharing their source code on Sourceforge. One student said, “I now have a better understanding of what it is like to work with and contribute to a team of people, even when I may never meet them in person.”

new Demographic

Computer science has not been broadly attractive at the undergraduate level, especially to women and other underrepresented groups. An April 2006 article in Computing Research Association Bulletin, based on data from

The hfoss
development
process has
no room for
lone programmers
working in
isolation.

the National Science Foundation and other sources, reported “[c]omputer science has the dubious distinction of being the only science field to see a fall in the share of its bachelor’s degrees granted to women between 1983 and 2002” ( http://www.cra.org/ wp/ index.php?p= 83).

Attracting women and other underrepresented groups to computing remains a particularly challenging HFOSS Project objective. Only four women were enrolled in a 13-student introductory course in spring 2008, and for the summer 2008 internship program, only six out of 29 applicants were women. Of the 10 CPATH-funded summer interns only three were women, and two others were African-American. These numbers are not good, though they are somewhat better than the numbers in non-HFOSS computer science courses. For example, the fall 2008 CS1 courses offered at Connecticut College, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University included only 10 women and two African-American students out of a total of 69 students.

While this data is too sparse to support conclusions one way or the other regarding the appeal of HFOSS to women and other historically underrepresented groups, evaluations received from participating students suggest that the HFOSS approach has the potential to attract more women students to computing in the future. The responses from them suggest they speak positively about the project to their female friends. To help address this issue, we will, in summer 2010, extend the HFOSS Project to include a women’s college and a traditionally black university. However, given the relatively small number of women and minorities who come to college with an interest in computing in the first place, the initiative may not solve the problem altogether; the solution, if there is one, may ultimately extend beyond the academy.

A widespread misconception about computing is that it is all about programming or coding. At most U.S. schools the introductory sequence focuses largely on teaching a programming language, further reinforcing this misconception. The HFOSS approach addresses it by contextualizing programming within a broader prob-