Tietojenkäsittelytieteen laitos

Fabian Fagerholm

When Arto Vihavainen gave me a tip to contact Stanford University, I knew we had a great opportunity to offer our students something out of the ordinary. In Software Factory, we've done distributed projects before, both with other universities in Finland and abroad, but there were some special things about the Stanford-Facebook project that we hadn't had previously. First, the number of participating universities and students were on a completely different scale. We had teams consisting of people from three continents and a wide range of cultural backgrounds. Second, the commitment from top-level Open Source projects meant that students would get feedback and advice they could not hope for in purely university-driven projects, even when an industry partner would be involved. Industry partners are excellent for providing expertise in their own field, but of course they are usually not experts in software development. Having an experienced mentor reviewing your code certainly encourages deep learning. And third, the fact that we would all meet in person and get to see the Stanford University campus, the Facebook office, and parts of friendly San Francisco, only added to the experience.

Once we had arrived, we had a very intense schedule but still managed to see some of the surrounds. The Stanford University campus is itself quite impressive. A large portion of the buildings are made of sandstone, and the architecture of these historical buildings has a distinct Spanish look. The campus spans over 8000 acres in the north of Silicon Valley, near Palo Alto city. One notable landmark is the Hoover Tower, which houses the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, a large collection of historical documents from 20th and 21st century world history. Herbert Hoover, who founded the collection, later went on to become President of the United States, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 1938. It was interesting to discover this link back to our home university!

At the Facebook office in Menlo Park, which is also a campus in its own right, our students spent their working time in a large hall, just behind the official Facebook Wall. Each Open Source project team worked together around their own table, getting familiar with each other, their Open Source mentor, the necessary development tools, and of course the code base they would be working on. Already during the first two days, students had contributed bug fixes and small feature enhancements to many of the projects. Meanwhile, faculty members met to discuss the challenges and opportunities of this type of teaching on a global scale. It was interesting to compare experiences with project-based teaching and to see that most universities are asking the same kinds of questions regarding computer science teaching: is it relevant and useful in preparing students for working life – whether in industry or academia – and how can deep learning be encouraged? I was happy to find that our department has a lot to be proud of on these points!

The trip to California was a great way to start the year and I'm looking forward to seeing how this international collaboration will develop in the future. And from what I heard on the trip back, our students were pretty happy, too!

Please visit our project blog where we will be posting our experiences from the project:
blogs.helsinki.fi/committed

See also: After Facebook visit, studying looks like work

About Software Factory Project: It is a course where students learn software engineering skills by managing a complex software development project as a team. Each project has its unique specialities, and this year, Software Factory is part of a large-scale Open Source collaboration coordinated by Stanford University and sponsored by Facebook. Some well-known Open Source projects and foundations, such as Ruby on Rails, Mozilla, and the Kotlin compiler project, provide mentors to help students into the projects and give them useful advice on how to contribute. In January, the student team and teachers from the Department of Computer Science were flown to San Francisco to participate in a kickoff Hackathon event where they met with more than 100 students from a dozen universities around the world, formed teams to do distributed development, and got to know the Open Source mentors.