Syllabus

Projects Seminar in FLOSS Game Development

Text Books

There are a number of textbooks we’ll be referencing throughout the quarter. You can find these books at http://hfoss.rtfd.org/books

What You’ll Do

This course will introduce students to the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Content movements, to the open source development process, and to the open questions of the efficacy of technology in the classroom.

Students will learn FOSS process and Tools with class projects that support the One Laptop Per Child community by creating content and software for free distribution to students and teachers around the world. The OLPC project is driven by a world-wide community.

For this course students will be expected to attend and make final presentations to the RIT and Rochester FOSS communities via the irregular Rochester Pythonistas meet-ups and FOSSBox hack-a-thons when possible. Students will also become members of the Sugar and OLPC international communities. Local FOSS community members may join us in class sessions as well. Treat them as you would another instructor, but they’re also your peers in moving this innovative project forward.

The spirit of the course

While still a course where you will receive a letter grade, the spirit of the course is intended to be both open and fun.

An open course – students will have access to the ‘document source’ for the syllabus. While you are reading the syllabus right now, as a student of the class you have a right to fork the upstream repository, make modifications, and submit patches for review. Barring a troll festival, this can create a fun, dynamic environment in which the course curriculum can develop by the very same mechanism being taught during the quarter (community-driven).

Licensing

All code developed by students in the course must be licensed (by the student) under any one of the licenses approved by the open source initiative.

Your code that you write is your code, with which you can do what you will; true. However, if you’re unwilling to license code you write for an open source course with an open source license, you’re in the wrong course.

Schedule

Week Day Topic Assigned Due
1 1 Meet online. Introductions    
2 Doh!    
2 1 Go over the syllabus. Discuss open-advice and PyCon videos. Introduction to git. Homework - First Flight  
2 Lightning Talks. Introduction to Python    
3 1 Intermediate Python Homework - Bugfix Homework - First Flight
2 Lightning Talks. “Advanced” Python    
4 1 Git Seminar. OLPC Distribution. OLPC Smoke Test. hw/stest Homework - Bugfix
2 Lightning Talks. Introduction to Sugar   hw/stest
5 1 Project Choices and Teams http://bit.ly/AeDmaK fnl/project  
2 Lightning Talks. In class development.    
6 1 User Testing    
2 Lightning Talks. In class development.    
7 1 User Testing    
2 Lightning Talks. In class development.    
8 1 User Testing    
2 Lightning Talks. In class development.    
9 1 User Testing    
2 Lightning Talks. Crunch Time. fnl/present  
10 1 Crunch Time.    
2 Final Presentations fnl/assmnt fnl/present fnl/project
11 ? Return the OLPCs   fnl/assmnt

Grading

Assignments are due at midnight of the day they are marked as due.

Late submissions will be deducted 10% per day they are late.


Your final grade for the quarter will be derived from the following weights.

Component Weight
In-Class Participation 15%
FLOSS Dev Practices (Blogging, patching, writing, IRC) 25%
Team Peer Assessment 20%
Completed Project 20%
Final Presentation 20%

Blog updates – students are required to keep a blog to which they post updates about their investigations, progress, success, and pitfalls. This blog can be hosted anywhere, but must be added to the course planet (there are instructions on how to do this in Homework - First Flight).

  • You must make at least one blog post per week to receive full credit.
  • You must participate regularly in the course’s IRC channel: asking and answering questions.
  • You must participate in the course’s mailman list, floss-seminar@lists.rit.edu.
  • Contributions to the course curriculum, syllabus, and rubric are factored in here as well.

Blogging is good for you and good for the FLOSS community at large.

The details for the final can be found at Final.

Lightning Talks - Extra Credit

Every Wednesday for the first portion of class, any student has the opportunity to give a lightning talk on a topic of their chosing. Your lightning talk must be less than 5 minutes in length and must be at least remotely related to the course material.

You will receive +1 extra credit points towards your final grade for every lightning talk you give. Only the first three lightning talks offered will be allowed during a given class. Talks will be chosen from among those offered by students on a FIFO basis.